[OT] What a fat lump of bloatedness

[Steve Firth]

Which was more Gates bullshit. Apple had paid Xerox for the tech that they obtained from Xerox[1]. I think Xerox's beef was that Apple ripped them off by not telling Xerox how great their idea was so the Xerox suits sold the tech. too cheap. To which my major response is "meh".

[1] Although they didn't give Xerox a clue that they were just about to steal Xerox's best brains for the Lisa/Mac project. Again, meh. If Xerox had marketed their product properly and had realised what they had to do to get it run on a micro rather than a mini they could have had the market all to themselves and their staff would not have been pissed off and eager to leave.

[Jules Richardson]

Yes, it would seem a bit silly not to, although ISTR having at least one Unix box which went to great lengths to hide the ability to run multiple processes from the user (presumably as a way of limiting resource usage and/or combined with a belief that "users didn't need to do that")

I also had a Philips minicomputer which ran a multi-user OS by way of being full of Z80 processors - each connected user would get their own Z80 and memory space, while the hard disk was shared across all users.

Hmm, that bit's interesting - I've got some industrial hardware in storage which runs Flex; I didn't realise it had such a history to it.

[Jules Richardson]

All hail the Sinclair Microdrive... ;)

[Andy Champ]

Concurrent CP/M (or Concurrent PC-Dos, as it came when they added some MS-DOS compatibility) was multi-tasking, multi user, but not windowed.

And BTW, it was a full pre-emptive scheduler. I once spent 18 months off-and-on tracking a bug that relied on that!

Andy

[John Rumm]

The quote was from a biography on Jobs IIRC.

Still there is plenty of similar cases... Gates acquiring the full rights to QDOS for a million, or his deal to pay a healthy percentage of the sales profits of IE to the creators of NCSA Mosaic and then giving IE away for nothing.

Indeed, a pattern oft repeated.

[Bernard Peek]

However it did run GEM which provided a GUI. With a bit of faffing about you could run more than one copy of GEM although only one could have a graphical interface.

[Huge]

Oh, Lord. I'd forgotten about those.

[Huge]

Hear, hear. If it didn't spit sheets of paper, Xerox's management weren't interested. The same thing happened with the guys who invented device independent page description languages; Interpress at Xerox. When nothing much happened, they all left and founded Adobe.

[Steve Firth]

I just about remember that. At the time it seemed like a brilliant move, but I think all that Xerox could see was the limited professional print market at that time filled by Monotype, Linotype etc. and there were limited numbers of those presses around the world, similar business model to IBM and mainframes, neither Xerox nor IBM realising that mere consumers would ever want the equivalent of a mainframe on the desk with a printing press standing by the side of it.

[Huge]

You can borrow the manual, if you want. :o)

I think you're half right; the senior management thought this. The geeks at PARC already had distributed, network connected laser printers (I still have a platter from the 25Mb (yes, really) disk from one hanging on my study wall) and suspected where the world was going, hence leaving to form Adobe & become fabulously wealthy. Management were worried that the "mainframe on the desk with a printing press standing by the side of it" model would eat into the large laser printer market (the Xerox 9700 was a huge seller at the time). And you know what, they were right. Except they could have sold those "printing presses" instead of HP and the Japanese.

No wonder they ended up in Chapter 11.

[Andy Champ]

Ummmm... are you sure about that?

Our hardware tied us to one graphical instance per terminal, and you could run it on multiple terminals. I don't recall if you could run multiple instances on one screen if you had the right hardware. Our smart serial terminals didn't.

Andy