[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 11:06:15AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> The topic was what they did *BEFORE* the release of the IBM PC in 1981, which
> was well before they released any Mac stuff, since the Mac didn't exist.

Actually that is not true. The Macintosh was under development before the
PC was released. Not as the Macintosh per se, but as the Lisa.

The story behind that is Microsoft was working on the Lisa in one
locked room, while down the hall in another locked room was IBM's
"project chess" which was released as the PC.


That's how Microsoft got the technology behind the original Windows.
Gates signed a noncompete agreement with Apple with a limit of a date
about three years in the future or 1 year after the product was released.

The Lisa was on schedule until Jobs was able to get a demo at Xerox's
PARC. Until that time they had a working GUI that was developed from
the published articles. Jobs saw the Xerox GUI and ordered the Lisa
GUI scrapped and replaced with what they saw at PARC.

If they had not scrapped the GUI, the Lisa would have been out sooner,
and it is very likely that Word and Excel would have been released for
the Lisa.

Geoff.

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