Guest post by InfoWorld’s John Rizzo chronicles the 20 most significant ideas and features Microsoft and Apple have stolen from each other in the lead up to Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. ‘Some features were stolen so long ago that they’ve become part of the computing landscape, and it’s difficult to remember who invented what.’ Windows 7’s Task Bar and Aero Peek come to mind as clear appropriations of Mac OS X’s Dock and Expose. Apple’s cloning of the Windows address bar in 2007’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as the path bar is another obvious ‘inspiration.’ But the borrowing goes deeper, Rizzo writes, providing a screenshot tour of Microsoft’s biggest grabs from Mac OS X and Apple’s most significant appropriations of Windows OS ideas and functionality.Everyone knows how Apple “stole” the GUI from Xerox PARC (they actually licensed it fair and square, and lucky for us, because it’s unlikely Xerox would have taken it to the mass market if Apple hadn’t) and then Microsoft “stole” it from Apple (though Microsoft licensed GUI tech from both Xerox and Apple). After the release of Windows 2.0, Apple sued Microsoft because they believed that the license agreement only covered Windows 1.0, but Microsoft prevailed in court. It’s an interesting story you can read more about here. And of course, Linux desktop tech is notoriously derivative of existing GUIs. Whenever someone develops a user interface that deviates drastically from the desktops we know, it fails to catch on, because, like it or not, people like familiarity. So we’ve seen an evolution rather than a revolution, and during that evolution, there’s been plenty of trading back and forth. And that’s been good for everybody.
Apple no longer enjoys the lead in GUI elegance that it had in the Windows 3.1 days, of course, and some might say that Apple has made major mis-steps in the past decade. Microsoft seems to have made steadier progress, as each Windows release has been markedly better in usability. But we now have a choice between several very usable OSes. It’s a little boring. Of course, we’re now facing a brand new personal computer land grab: mobile. In this one, it’s 1993 all over again, with Microsoft stuck with a workaday mobile OS and Apple pushing the envelope. This time, there are a few more viable OS contenders, with Nokia, Google, Palm, Intel, and others all scrambling for a piece. No doubt the “stealing” will continue, with each new mobile OS release emulating the best parts of the others. Let’s hope so.
5. Screen Sharing: Remote Desktop Connection
It’s called NXHost and it was in NeXTStep long before Microsoft or Apple could dream of it’s capabilities.
Since when could RDP be used to share a computer screen? I’ve never seen it used that way. From what I’ve seen, it’s only for remote, GUI logins.
VNC needs to be installed in order to share the screen with another user sitting in front of the computer.
VNC and RDP have two very different use-cases.
RDP is closer to X11 XDMCP (remote X logins) than to VNC.
Haven’t used the desktop sharing in MacOS X, but I believe it’s closer to VNC than RDP.
Actually, Apple’s screen sharing is VNC underneath the interface. You can connect to any VNC server with the screen sharing app, and VNC clients are able to connect to you. In fact, the server bundle just happens to be called AppleVNCServer.Bundle. iChat’s screen sharing feature is simply a frontend to the screen sharing app so that you do not have to specify IP addresses and/or port numbers, but it’s all standard VNC underneath.
RDP is capable of screen sharing. Remote Assistance, Windows Meeting Space/Microsoft SharedView, etc. use RDP to do this. The API was made public in Vista for third-party apps to utilize.
http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2007/03/08/windows-desktop-sharin…
Prior to RDP, Netmeeting also supported screen sharing.
2 words: Remote assistance. You can also setup a RDP connection so both users can see the desktop. This is under administrative tools -> Terminal Services Manager
Pre-dating the same functionality in the X Window system & products from Citrix?
Add-on products like Citrix and Timbuktu don’t count, as they are not bundled/part of the OS.
XDMCP does predate Windows and MacOS, though.
I’d like to know what GNU and Linux have “stolen” (or copied) over the years…
Now go and mod me down to the hell.
that would take a very long time to itemize it out like that. Stolen has such a nasty connotation, let’s say “borrowed.”
100% from scratch inovation is rare these days, virtually everything has its roots in something else.
I would argue that innovation never happens and has never happened from scratch. Nothing is ever created in a vacuum. Everything “new” is influenced by what came before it.
J. Michael Straczynski said one time that “good writers borrow, bad writers steal.” A good writer will take old ideas and add to them. The same thing happens in all of the other creative arts including coding and engineering.
Picasso was quoted as good artists copy, great artists steal. They see the vision where it could go and capitalize on it and create their own style.
A good position for him to take, since B5 drew heavily from Tolkien
Or, as one of my former design profs used to put it: “There are no original ideas, so make sure you steal from the best.”
It’s only stealing if by taking it you’re depriving the owner of its use. We have a word for being inspired by someone else’s idea and creating something derivative: invention. There’s nothing morally wrong with copying a user interface element that works, or improving on it slightly. It’s not even illegal in most circumstances. Without “stealing” we would have no civilization and no technology.
Sure.
I used the same words as the parent article.
Even put those in quotation marks.
I think every gets the context; no stealing in the legal sense here, nor in the parent article.
No worries. I absolutely understood that you were using that word with a wink. Authors and comedians and even inventors are always talking about stealing ideas from other people, and they use it in a tongue-in-cheek manner. I’d like to see the moral failing aspect of copying good ideas from other people to be reduced.
Answer : Absolutely Nothing.
GNU and Linux have the distinction of being entirely Legal and not relying on any stolen or copied technology.
But then you already knew that.
lol.
1950 GM OS
Well according to Steve Ballmer, apparently around 200+ patents “at least.”
Yes, but how many of them are for things like “A mouse cursor that changes to an I-frame when it’s over a textbox” or “A button that displays a menu of installed programs”?
there are so many errors in the list that it hurts…
Errors I’ve spotted (there are probably more):
Features apple stole from Windows
* (1) It could be argued that both Windows and Mac sidebars hail from the folder tree pane in the Windows 3.1 File Manager and probably beyond.
* (3) The back and forward buttons in folder views first appeared in the IE4 desktop update for Windows 95 and shipped in Windows 98, not 2000 as it says.
* (5) Remote desktop connection is simply the name that Terminal Services is given in client versions of Windows. As such it has been around since NT4.
* (6) Microsoft did not invent backup. While MS OS’s have included a backup utility since DOS (5.0?), I doubt it was the first OS to do so.
* (7) From System 7 to 9, the Control Panels folder was a real filesystem folder that held the control panels. They had to be in this folder to be loaded on startup. Windows 95 copied the UI, but made it a virtual folder (view). Prior to system 7, it was a desk accessory, you could say that Mac OS X is simply a return to the pre-System 7 way of doing it.
* (10) This is just silly. Sure Apple didn’t have a command prompt prior to OS X, but adding one is simply an artifact of the UNIX underpinnings, not an attempt to copy Microsoft.
Features Microsoft stol from Mac OS X
* (4) Windows first recieved image previews (and a slightly-hidden optional thumbnail view) in the aforementioned IE4 desktop update/Windows 98. Well before OS X existed.
* (8) It was possible to save searches in Windows 95, 98 and NT4, but the option was lost in Windows 2000, only to reappear in a slightly different form in Vista.
* (9) A tree view of network shares on the left of file icons first appeared as part of the “Windows Explorer” interface in Windows 95 and has been available in every version of Windows since. The Windows 7 “placed bar” could be seen as a slight tweak of the explorer functionality.
Apple did not “steal” Commond Prompt from Windows, even if “steal” here is meant tongue-in-cheek. I’ll go along with the fact that it didn’t appear in Mac OS 1-9, but it did appear in NeXT, which became OSX, and NeXT took it from X Windows, whose origin predates Microsoft Windows.
Likewise, the Amiga had a command-line shell in its windowing system from the start. I don’t think this influenced any of the parties named here, but as with most things, Amiga did it first for the desktop, and until recently their version was better than anyone else’s. 😛
The 8-bit computers only had a command line.
LOAD “$”, 8, 1
That’s:
LOAD “*”,8,1
(at least on the Commodore 64)
Not for a directory listing. That’s just to open the first file on disk/tape.
It’s LOAD “$”,8 actually.
A LOAD “$”,8,1 would mess badly with your screen. 🙂
the “command line” was one of the first ways to do anything on a computer after they went from manual reporgramming of data lines and punch cards and paper tape and what not.
Command line predates X-windows.
Uhm, guys, I’m not talking about who invented the command-line interface; I’m talking about who first provided a command-line interface application in a windowed program. Read the article, already.
And that would be the Amiga.
As mentioned by others, the author seems to ignore all other OSes besides OSX and Windows. It’s a very badly researched article, even if you stick to a STRICT reading of the articles points.
And what year would that be? I’m guessing X and even W had terminal programs almost as soon as they existed. So, 198[34] would be the years to beat.
I’m willing to bet that Doug Englebart’s NLS system had one. It had everything else. That was 1967.
Judging by the the list, they mean “steal” as it’s typically used by OS advocates & fanboys: a specialized version of the “post hoc” fallacy. It amounts to “Company A introduced feature N before Company B, therefore Company B stole feature N from Company A.”
..a mod down button.
A lot of these features existed in other OSes long before they appeared in Windows or OS X, Task Bar (RISC OS), File Paths (IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop File Browser), Saved Searches (BeOS Queries), etc.
The funny thing is that any modern OS is built on thousands of ideas from other OSes over the years. (Threads, Memory Protection, HAL, Desktops, Device Drivers, Trash Cans, Mice, Sliders, Radio buttons, Processes, Filesystem journaling, Menus, Icons, Boot Splashes, well you get the idea.)
And it’s good, and that’s exactly why software patents should not exist!
I couldn’t agree with you more.
We frequently remark on all the ideas that Linux has borrowed from Apple and Microsoft in an effort to be ‘on par’ with their user experience… but I feel like there are a few often neglected items that have found their way into the Apple/Windows world from Linux. Virtual Workspaces, for example, have been part of almost every linux desktop environment (even the ‘light weight’ / minimalist ones) forever and were only recently introduced as a ‘feature’ of OSX (when Leopard was released, I believe).
I could be very mistaken, but I also believe the whole PostIt!/”Sticky Note” concept has been available in GNOME and KDE for ages…and may possibly pre-date related implementations in Win or Apple camps.
Also, as noted by a number of people as soon as the first builds of Win7 leaked… the taskbar appears to borrow more aesthetic inspiration from KDE4’s panel than it does the Dock. But that’s likely more an amalgamation of ideas than anything.
the problem with such lists is that you have to know the origin of a feature before you can say who copied it
and the features you mentioned definitely don’t come from linux (as most win/mac features don’t come from mac/win)
Exactly. And that’s why, unlike the article, I framed my attributions in a rather ‘non-committal’ manner… because I don’t really know. =/
Take the example of GNU.
The whole practical ideology behind GNU was to provide alternatives to common UNIX tools. As sad as it might be, at the level of true innovation and originality, GNU has not contributed anything worth mentioning.
Even today, several of high-profile GNU projects are nothing but copy-and-rewrite something that someone else came up with. I appreciate them doing all this work and they make good (alternative) tools, but at the fundamental level they are just “copying”.
Edited 2009-10-12 18:53 UTC
I’m afraid I can’t agree to that. Even though you used quotes around “copying”. To copy is to not do any work, or to do very little. But if you’re given the task of replicating functionality by implementing it from scratch it’s certainly not as easy as “copying” would make it seem. Yes, innovation and breakthroughs in conceptual development are hard and those who do it deserve credit. But actual implementation, even if it is re-implementation, is work that is just as hard and also deserves credit. And very often those who reimplement software perform feats of innovation themselves, during the creation of their particular solutions of implementation.
This is actually why sharing ideas and allowing reimplementation is good, and why blocking ideas or software or fundamental knowledge like math with patents is bad. Because by building upon ideas from others we evolve much faster.
Let me put it this way. If you see a public park arranged in a particularly nice way and you go home and work hard and make your garden look that way too, does it mean that you stole from that park? Yes, those who made the park payed for a skilled designer. But they meant the park to be seen by the public at large and once you saw it you cannot “unsee” it.
Should I avoid following the philosophical ideas in a book because the author thought about them first? Even though he meant for them to be read? Should we refrain from using things that get into our brains because we feel like we owe whoever had that idea first?
No big disagreements here. Replicating functionality deserves credit, especially when done in the spirit of free/open source software. I did try to mention that.
But, and this is intentionally provocative, GNU should not go to the history books as an innovator in the field of software. In the field of software licenses and politics around software, sure, they should be (and will be) remembered.
Edited 2009-10-12 20:15 UTC
Look, I’m a programmer and I don’t think you are. As a matter of course, programmers innovate all the time. They’re given limited resources and are asked to write software to a certain spec. And in order to make that software as good as possible within the given limitations, they resort to all kinds of interesting solutions. Quite often it’s things they haven’t tried before, ideas they get as they go. Yes, it’s very seldom a world premiere for those ideas. But within the realm of experience of a particular programmer, he innovates.
It would be hard to say whether the people who wrote the GNU userland used new (to them) ideas, which they thought up all by themselves. You’d have to study and compare existing solutions at that time, and which of them they had been exposed to before. But trust me when I say that, in writing an userland from scratch, like in writing any software from scratch, they innovated at least a bit.
We all do. What we call our reasoning is the sum of past experiences and the ideas we’ve aquired in all the time we’ve lived. To act upon them is natural. And every time you encounter something you haven’t before and you apply that reasoning to find a solution, and you manage by yourself, you innovate. And if you were to trace back the ideas involved you’ll find out that most, if not all, of them came from somewhere else. This is what intelligent thought is: applying past experience to new circumstances. Asking who “really owns” that past experience is silly and irrelevant.
I am a programmer and see your point, which, however, quite nicely missed the whole argument.
Stretching the conventional meaning of the word “innovate” in the technological context does not really make justice to the (bad) parent article. Keep it simple.
Edited 2009-10-12 21:15 UTC
Obviously if Microsoft or Apple recreated apt-get and made it work for windows/osx down to the last command line option, then you would be admiring them for the great “Innovation” ……
The GNU project is many things, but not innovative by any stretch of the imagination.
Actually the GNU counterparts of the unix userland tools have more often than not a different set of command line options, and usually extra functionality (if only because they can afford updating more often).
I agree with your general belief as stated elsewhere in your post that innovation is a cumulative process. However, I have to take issue with the part of your statement that I bolded.
Reimplementation is NEVER as hard as working with original inspiration. That original programmer had to, first of all, be inspired, and inspiration doesn’t happen on command. I can spend weeks fighting a problem and a night banging it out in code.
How much effort did Microsoft, for instance, put into creating Windows keyboard shortcuts? (A big one the article missed). Virtually all Windows’ basic keyboard shortcuts were lifted from the Mac: ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+x, ctrl+a, ctrl+z…. Woohoo, they changed from Command key to Control Key. Sure it had to be programmed from scratch on a different platform, but they didn’t have to do any legwork.
Think about everything that had to go into that. Some Apple designer had to think “maybe kb shortcuts would speed up this GUI thing.” Then he had to sell the idea to his fellow devs, then to management, probably make a mockup all his own, maybe he had to fight for it against GUI purists, maybe go over his boss’ head and alienate coworkers thereby jeopardizing his job, then program basic functionality, then code it, test it, fine tune it over years as others throw their ideas in and new shortcuts are added… Think about how much work went into deciding which common actions needed KB shortcuts and which keys to assign to each action.
Then you have MS. Probably farmed the work out to drones in Ireland or India with a spec sheet that said “augment GUI functionality with KB shortcuts. Key assignments should conform with existing industry usage.” Wink, Wink.
Reimplementing is in no way shape/ fashion/ form as hard or heartbreaking as making new functionality. Reimplementing is hanging your hat on ideas that have already withstood the real world. Outside the legal aspect, there isn’t any risk.
Edited 2009-10-13 16:27 UTC
There were keyboard shortcuts back in the command line days.
Sure they were (are) different, but it’s the same concept translated to the GUI.
Heh, your truism/comment is really perverse, but RMS deserves it. Hell, you even found the most foxy context (article) for it, LOLZ!
Indeed, FSF don’t deserve our fairness because they promise and don’t deliver. As sad as it sounds, they pretend they’re all about innovation but all they do is they basically provide “free software” versions of warez that, well, I can always download for free anyway. Philosophically speaking, at some fundamental level they are just “downloading” the warez for me.
(Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate FSF doing all this work. I just hate doublespeak. Especially honestly sad, appreciative, and off-topic doublespeak.)
You are wrong. Free Software have innovation. Take a look at KDE4. What desktop environment you know that is completely based on SVG? And what about the folder view widget? On this, i belive it was proprietary software that copied from FOSS (http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/)
Take a look at KDE4. What desktop environment you know that is completely based on SVG?
I wouldn’t really call that innovation. SVG existed already before, SVG has been used in DEs in many places already (themes, icons, wallpapers) so they just extended the use of it to the rest of the DE, too. It was a good move, but hardly a totally new innovation.
And what about the folder view widget?
A window which display you the contents of a specific folder in a graphical manner and allows you to manipulate those contents…Let’s see, does anything else do that? Oh, wait, almost ALL graphical file managers. The only different here is that it’s part of your desktop, not an individual window. That too is not really invention, it’s just yet another way to implement this functionality.
Then nothing is innovative anymore, since everything is based on something used somewhere else.
I wouldn’t really call that innovation. SVG existed already before, SVG has been used in DEs in many places already (themes, icons, wallpapers) so they just extended the use of it to the rest of the DE, too. It was a good move, but hardly a totally new innovation.
And what exactly you understand by inovation? You do realize that without old ideas you can’t inovate, right? It’s humanly impossible to inovate without taking some old ideas. What you are saying is that “the invension of fire is not an innovation because they already had wood and the friction was nothing new, so all they had to do was to join these two things (wood + friction) to make fire”
Basing everything on a format designed to be easily parsed rather then for size or speed makes me cringe a little….
I wouldn’t be wrong even if you were right about KDE4.
Firstly KDE is not FSF. (But I admit this is nitpicking.) Secondly, my reply was for strcpy only. The two of us share our own delusional world. Even some cliches, as you probably didn’t notice.
KDE4 was based upon *hype*. They took every buzzword that was flying around a several years ago and based KDE3+1 upon it. And the results, in a real world sense, speak for themselves. It was an interesting experiment.
Don’t speak like that. You are not the only one dissatisfied with this transition, but this doesn’t mean we have to say all kind of bullshit just to get it out of our chest. AFAICT, pretty soon we can conveniently switch back to KDE.
KDE4 was based upon *hype*. They took every buzzword that was flying around a several years ago and based KDE3+1 upon it. And the results, in a real world sense, speak for themselves. It was an interesting experiment.
I will not discuss that with you since obviously you don’t know what you are talking about and just what to troll.
Read more about that buzzwords you say on the link below and grow up.
http://thomasmcguire.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/akonadi-nepomuk-and-s…
Hmmm…
Emacs (’nuff said)
GCC (probably the most widely used compiler available)
Gzip (if I’m not mistaken, this was the best compression around for quite a while)
The GNU General Public License (the most widely usd free/open source software license)
The concept of Free Software
Not innovative?
I’ll just correct this single one: FYI, Emacs dates to the 1970s, long before GNU even existed.
’nuff said.
Edited 2009-10-14 10:09 UTC
From Wikipedia:
This is what I’d call ’nuff said.
You nicely missed the part of TECO and the “E-editor” in the Wikipedia.
Also:
and
’nuff said, hehehe.
(Note also that the talk was about GNU, not about RMS’ personal achievements or innovations.)
Edited 2009-10-14 11:24 UTC
I did mention Gosling Emacs (a clear example of *direct* precedence), which was ’nuff said. I couldn’t have mentioned it if I’d planned to “hide evidence”, as you seem to be implying. Like this, I “nicely missed” most of the Wikipedia article, and so did you.
Also, you seem to imply that my quotes referred to two different projects, but this is basically irrelevant, since we’re talking about innovation, which is a line in the sand somewhere in the seventies, not about some nominal project identity.
Then you added two quotes that I supposedly missed.
The first one was implied from my two quotes. Note the years in each.
The second one is, guess what, exactly one of my two quotes! So I obviously… didn’t miss it. Actually I’m quite surprised that you honestly managed to “nicely miss” it in my message, especially since I have no idea what was at stake. One of only two quotes in a message made of only two quotes and a short punchline/conclusion, all of which were actually *supporting your original point! Come on!
*Well, to be fair, my facetious boasting about fixing your previously unreferenced points may have been confusing. But then you should learn to read messages, not minds/intentions, heh.
One question: who the heck slavishly mods up all of your comments, no matter how auxiliary (and thus unexciting) they are?!?
I know how my question sounds, but I’m not implying anything and my indignation is nothing personal. I’m just new to osnews and I want to know how I can check this.
Most of your comments have a score of at least 2 as soon as you post them. Almost all of mine have a score of 1, no matter how ingenious I sound.
Or is that a default, like some veteran bonus?
I’ve wondered the same thing: sometimes when I post the comment is automatically 2 “points”, sometimes 1. I don’t know if that correlates with the total amount of posts you’ve made or something.
Firstly, several are “rewrites” – however the vast majority of those rewrites add massively to the original. Secondly, there are GNU has many many projects – many of which are highly inovation and very unique. Have you ever seen another “text editor”/OS like GNU EMACS – or how about a boot loader like GNU GRUB?
Windows actually borrows a lot from KDE these days. Then again it was Apple that once used a KDE wallpaper as their default in one release.
Edited 2009-10-12 18:50 UTC
Link please?
Umm…yeah, you’re very mistaken on this. Stickies were in the Macintosh System 7 (and I believe System 6 too), which predates Gnome and KDE. Now, maybe it was first on some other system, but Gnome and KDE certainly didn’t invent them.
This article made my head hurt, especially the part about Apple adding support for Microsoft Exchange. If you’re going to use “adding support for someone else’s products” as your definition for borrowing ideas, what’s the point?
But it was Novell that rocketed that once and still trivial application to true success by placing a framework the likes of which makes “OpenOffice.org” look like “Hello World” underneath it. That’s innovative, isn’t it?
I recall seeing a freeware Windows sticky note application years ago for Windows 98 or 95. Was it the very first one? I doubt it.
I remember one, In windows 3.11
What has happened to journalism? Writers no longer do simplistic things such as spell checking or FACT checking. Instead we get poorly written misinformation like this.
*sigh*
Edited 2009-10-12 19:20 UTC
Amen to that.
Welcoem to the internet, where everyone can be heard. Unfortunately that mean everyone thinks they should be heard.
isn’t it possible for two companies to come up with similar concepts independently of one another. Please excuse my ignorance if there is some law of OS-feature-innovation-exclusivity in the universe that I don’t know about…
isn’t it possible for two companies to come up with similar concepts independently of one another
Of course it is, it’s just highly unlikely. Though, there is nothing wrong with taking an existing good idea and implementing it. Even better if you take the idea and improve on it. There rarely happens any really new innovations in the computing landscape. Usually everything builds on something someone else has come up with. As such it is silly to start complaining about someone copying another one. It happens in EVERY field of life, and it is actually the reason why we have gotten even as far as we are as an almost-sentient race.
Although it’s very unlikely there is a recent example not from the OS wars, but from the browser wars. I’m talking about the super/awesome/whatever bar introduced in Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5, with the two releases being a week apart.
But consider that the Mozilla code would have been available in snapshot form for quite a while before the official release, while Opera is developed internally.
Oh, really? Then, if Opera “stole” it from Firefox, how come Opera was the one released one week earlier?
Speaking of steeling ideas…
I was thinking about what examples Apple provides for anti-software-patent campaigns. Before they adopted FreeBSD, did they have patents on their previous low-level system?
If they did, then it’s an example of parallel efforts, one copyright based and one patent based, with the patent based effort finally admitting that the copyright based effort had produced much better software.
If anyone knows of the patent status of Apple’s previous low level software, that’d be very useful. Thanks.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_3#Innovation_without_patents:_Apple…
Microsoft didn’t “copy” this from MacOS X, as it was available in Windows XP, and enabled by default. I don’t have any Windows 2000 installs to check against, but it’s probably even in there. It’s that little Folder Option “Automatically search for network shares and printers”. And they automatically show up in the folder list under Windows Networking (or similar, don’t have an XP machine handy to check the exact wording). This even worked for Novell network shares.
I know Windows 98 has something similar for network printers. It’s really annoying to have 20+ “Auto” printers appear in Windows when you connect a laptop to a corporate network (and some home networks). Just move to a proper print server setup already!!
Can’t remember if Win98 supported the automatic searching of network shares or not.
Edited 2009-10-12 20:29 UTC
Windows XP came with built-in support for burning CDs, although I’ve never used it personally. Did this utility not support burning CDs from .iso files?
No, it doesn’t. The lack of that facility can be… really annoying.
No it doesn’t. It really needs to though.
Hrm, didn’t know that. I’ve never really used the built-in burning features in Windows, always installing a copy of Nero.
imgburn ftw
Old-timers will also remember that Apple computers started out with command-line OSes as well.
Did this reporter do any kind of research? Oh, wait, it’s an InfoWorld article, so of course not.
What a waste of electrons.
“Old-timers will also remember that Apple computers started out with command-line OSes as well. ”
not the mac. Unlike windows/unix, Apple never had a gui that ran off a commandline OS.
Technically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Apple_II
OK, it’s not THE first Mac, but Apple used CLIs also.
yes but when they did have a gui, like on the mac, they didn’t run it off the CLI. It took a long time for microsoft to quit running Windows off of dos.
There wasn’t much inherently CLI about DOS, just that the default application run after boot was usually COMMAND.COM
The Apple Macintosh had a CLI application from 1985: the Apple development environment MPW. Very Unixy.
Would it have made everyone feel better if Windows had made a new WIN.COM program that called all the appropriate DOS routines to launch itself from DOS without a command line?
It took them 4 releases of Windows before they started running Windows without DOS. Or does everyone forget about Windows NT 3.1?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
Ummm…. did too. It’s called GS/OS and ran on the Apple IIGS. It was very mac-like.
deleted
Edited 2009-10-13 06:11 UTC
Ive never seen the phrase “Standing on the shoulders of Giants” so apt.
All OS’s borrow from each other, they all stand on each other to push computers forward. It tends to be a modern thing were people think that features are stolen, due to crap like patents. In the early days people where sharing ideas from each other all the time.
Same thing happens in the car industry, Volvo invented seat belts, Merc’s gave us ABS brakes. Good ideas evolve and are adopted, i see this as natural progression. At the end of the day a good idea is a good idea and i hope it gets included with all three major os’s, i wouldn’t want to be a snob and think that because im using a mac that no one else can share clever features / ideas and i have exclusive use.
Exactly. We should all count ourselves lucky the Roman empire wasn’t able to patent a ‘road’.
Well that convinced me that software patents are a bad idea. It’s a dam good thing that MS, Apple, Linux (and I wonder if the taskbar in Windows didn’t come from the RISCOS iconbar)have been copying each other. – Our computing experience would be much worse if they hadn’t.
That article was the biggest crock of sh-t I’ve ever seen.
Remote Desktop – X-Windows had it since the beginning on UNIX systems back in the 80’s. Not to mention NeXTStep.
Command Prompt – MS INVENTED THE COMMAND PROMPT?!??! BWAHAHAHHAH The CMD/Command.com shell has to be the weakest most feeble shell in existance. Interactive CLI shells have been around since the 50’s and 60’s. They are almost as old as the computer itself. Some of the earliest I’ve seen are OS/8 and DCL.
PowerShell is neat but the learning curve is steep and it doesn’t even work correctly out of the box. Personally I’d rather just bang something out in TCL.
Forward/Back Buttons in Explorer Windows – This was kind of necessary for non-spatial filemanagers period. This is so obvious it doesn’t count as innovation.
Time Machine – wow….. haven’t people been doing incremental rsync backups forever? Is this not similar to CVS in some ways?
Hell, even the Windows minimize and close icons are just like NeXT.
This was obviously written by some retard kid, not a computing professional who has been around for a decade or two. His idea of innovation is silly as well. The real innovation is under the hood. Apple kicked MS’s ass on the GUI front a LONG LONG time ago.
Comparisons like this just show the ignorance of Windows users who never bother to learn other platforms or even learn how their own platform actually works. This guy should have taken a trip to Wikipedia at least.
Under the hood there’s no comparison between Windows and OS X. I’ll take Snow Leopard and its rich elegant API’s, free development environment and INDUSTRY STANDARD SHELLS AND TOOLS.
Not that I’m a mac zealot, I’m more of a BSD UNIX guy.
When I was in college (i.e. recently), I was eating with a friend who was a student-worker in the school’s IT department. I was talking up the Ubuntu of the period, I forget which, when he said, “you know, you Linux people really should give Microsoft some credit for inventing the kernel.” Not the NT kernel; the concept of a kernel in general, which apparently did not exist until NT.
Errrr. That was a huge part of the NEXTSTEP file manager. It sat on the top… above the file pane. It was drag and drop if I remember correctly, too… and slid left and right. Much better than the current version implemented in OS X. But I am glad it is there.
…
Control panels… Mac OS had them in a convenient place too, the drop down menu. All in one place.
…
These and other things make it clear that the article’s author never used Mac OS <=9. He should hang is head in shame and never, ever publish anything else.
This article reminded of the the fanboy fights that always erupt of any movie,TV show, or game where one side gripes that A has copied elements from movie/TV show/game X, Y, or Z.
The comments are as stupid as the article. If apple didn’t copy MS then vice-versa too. All the features were stolen off one guy or the other, so just get over it
It’s nice to know that journalists are still ignorant and fail to perform basic research, as in he apparently never heard of NeXT & NeXTStep which is where OSX came from and featured most of these “stolen” ideas. Excepting a few things like time machine…
Edited 2009-10-13 15:31 UTC
I second that; it would be nice to look at what Linux and BeOS also had before either the Mac OS or Windows did (e.g., Microsoft so does NOT deserve credit for being the first to include a CLI in a GUI environment).
Yeah…
just like, the dock:
http://av5.com/imgs/jns/journals/1/8/82/image004.gif
and NeXT too had a dock long ago…
There are very few original ideas coming from Apple and MS these days. Most of time, they just copied from another OS
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
The whole IT-branche is non-innovative.
I have been around for a while but innovations come from other disciplines like medicine, the use of ceramic materials in engines etc. etc.
The only innovation I can see is nontechnical, it is the process of developing open source software, that phenomena, started by Stallman, has grown to something that is changing the IT-world, but that is only my opinion. . . .
BTW Apple’s praised “Designs” were “borrowed” as well.
I think that Microsoft stole the Mouse from Apple right?
~sent from ASUS 1005HA netbook http://bit.ly/44CHFm
Really?
I think usability has gone backwards since Win2K, where as Apple’s OS X seems to be better than ever.
Flashier looking != better usability.
[BTW: I’m an XP (classic mode) desktop user]