The amazing triumph of Windows 8

Eat your heart out, Apple: Windows 8 is a vision of computing that is not only thoroughly re-imagined, but in many ways superior to anything else out there

D.B. Grady

The myth that will not die is that in 1979, Steve Jobs went to Xerox PARC, snooped around, and stole the company's graphic user interface. In truth, the Macintosh project was well underway before Jobs' visit. The trip was arranged so that he might better understand exactly what Apple engineers were undertaking. As interface designer Jef Raskin once explained, "The Macintosh project was killed several times, and it was usually Jobs who was killing it, because he didn't understand it; I figured if he understood it, and could see something like it, before we were ready to show anything, that he would be more sympathetic." Raskin's gambit worked. Apple traded company stock in exchange for licenses to Xerox technology.

Microsoft's quest for a graphic user interface was a bit more aggressive. Bill Gates is said to have asked his engineers to create something "just like a Mac." He licensed technology from Xerox, but also plucked ideas liberally from Apple's design. The result was something called Windows. Right away, Apple wasn't happy about it and hinted at a lawsuit to thwart the blatant theft of its intellectual property. When Gates responded by threatening to abandon the Macintosh platform altogether, Apple relented. As John Scully, former CEO of Apple, explained, "While who was right was legally debatable, we couldn't afford to sue the only company developing successful software for Macintosh at a still turbulent time." In exchange for a commitment of office software for the Mac, Apple licensed its "visual displays" to Microsoft, retroactively making Windows 1.0 legal. At any rate, there was no harm at the time — Windows 1.0 was an aesthetic abomination running on comparatively primitive hardware. Things changed with Windows 2.0, however; PC horsepower was increasing, and Windows was accordingly closing the gap. The companies ended up in court, and Apple lost.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
David W. Brown

David W. Brown is coauthor of Deep State (John Wiley & Sons, 2013) and The Command (Wiley, 2012). He is a regular contributor to TheWeek.com, Vox, The Atlantic, and mental_floss. He can be found online here.