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Mr GBNorman: I'm entertained by your contributions. Two things strike a chord: I'm an old Mac guy since the day my son was issued one at college in 1984. I had "fiddled" around with Commodore 64 teaching myself enough BASIC to write one or two lines of code, but not much more than that. What astonished me was how the "revolutionary" new operating system know as WINDOWS (which was released a short time later) was nothing but a total rip-off of the Macintosh OS. I could not believe such a theft could go unpunished and I wrote an essay about it, pre-blog days, which can be read by searching "My Adventures in Home Computing" by John Warner. The second thing is your mention of Boca Raton. I used to stay at a little motel named The Villager Beach Motel, situated on A1A just below the boundary line between Boca Raton (translated "mouth of the RAT!")and Deerfield Beach. It was not fancy but clean and inexpensive, at least when I frequented it.
Posts: 2 | From: South Jersey | Registered: Feb 2011
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URL links are perfectly OK here as they do not violate Fair Use (Title 17 USC Sec 107); they are simply directing a user to the material of note:
Brief passage (within the scope of Fair Use):
For all its success, the Apple II was still just a toy! It needed an application that would make it DO SOMETHING USEFUL. The PC was the product of the "flower-children" of the West Coast. The "hippies" thought it was "groovy", but the application that would launch it into the billion-dollar business, that it was to become, was on the blackboards of the Harvard Business School. An MBA student named Dan Bricklin, who had some programming experience, was working on a program to automate the laborious calculations needed to "run the numbers", using the accepted Harvard Business School tables, to workout profits and expenses in business. All the values in the tables are related to each other, and so, changes in one year will "ripple" through the table and affect the prices and profits in subsequent years. Since all the values in the table are related, one mistake could mean disaster!
He enlisted the aid of a friend, Bob Frankston, to write the code. They called the program The Visible Calculator, or VISICALC, and began to give VISICALC to anyone who wanted a copy. The first copies went on sale at Marv Goldschmitt's Computer Store in Bedford, Mass. in October, 1979
Posts: 9982 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:Originally posted by jaydublyew: What astonished me was how the "revolutionary" new operating system know as WINDOWS (which was released a short time later) was nothing but a total rip-off of the Macintosh OS. I could not believe such a theft could go unpunished.............
I agree with you ONE THOUSAND percent! It is amazing to me that Windoze was allowed to copy Apple, and not suffer any consequences. I'm not a patent lawyer, nor do I know anything about inventions or how this type of stuff works. All I know is what my gut tells me. And my gut tells me that Microsoft flat-out committed theft. And what I continued not to understand is how other companies are STILL allowed to rip-off Apple's inventions? A great example is the iPod (the very first, original iPod). That invention ALONE is what started the ball rolling for putting CD's, albums, cassette tapes, etc, out of business. The mp3 business was born, and EVERYONE wanted in on it. How are other companies allowed to get away with the technology that Apple invented with the current iPod's where you have a touch screen that can go into "landscape" mode because of the built in accelerometer? And then Apple invented the "App Store" so that people could have free (or low cost) add-ons to their iPods.
I don't understand how it's allowed. Maybe today, there is some type of legal agreement in place for all of Apple's new inventions.....I don't know. But for the original design where they came up with a mouse that you click, and folders on the screen, dragging and dropping, putting things into the "trash" to delete them......all of those things are Apple, so how was Windoze allowed to copy that and sell it as their own product? I'm certain that I'm not the first person to ask this question, so the answer must be somewhere. Well, what's done is done...at least it has created competition which has kept Apple inventing things and coming out with newer and more awesome gizmos! (By the way, I bought a new Apple gizmo last night....I just had to have it! I got the 15 inch MacBook Pro, 2.66 MHz, Intel i7, and lots of other goodies. It is an AWESOME computer.)
Posts: 2355 | From: Pleasanton, CA | Registered: Apr 2007
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