We all know about Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 2.0, but this wasn’t the only look-and-feel lawsuit Apple filed during those years. Digital Research, Inc., the company behind GEM, also found itself on the pointy end of Apple’s needle. Unlike the lawsuit against Microsoft, though, Apple managed to ‘win’ the one against DRI.
Digital Research, Inc. is a hallowed name in the industry. The company was founded by Dr. Gary Kildall to sell and further develop his CP/M operating system. In the first half of the ’80s, DRI developed an implementation of the ISO standard Graphical Kernel System, a low-level system for 2D vector graphics, called Graphics System Extension. GSX eventually formed the basis for GEM.
GEM, or Graphical Environment Manager, was to serve as DRI’s graphical user interface on top of CP/M and later DR-DOS and other versions of DOS. GEM’s star shone particularly bright as the user interface for the Atari ST, a computer that competed with the Amiga, the original Macintosh, and earlier versions of Windows.
Apple wasn’t happy with having to deal with competition, so the company started to sue everyone it thought it could get away with. We all know the lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 2.0, which Apple eventually lost because Microsoft had actually licensed much of the GUI technology from Apple – Cupertino claimed this only covered Windows 1.0, but the courts disagreed. Ten elements were not covered by Microsoft’s license, but the courts ruled that these were not worthy of protection.
Interestingly enough, Apple didn’t just sue Microsoft over look and feel – two other companies were sued as well: Hewlett-Packard and Digital Research. The suit against HP was about NewWave, an object-oriented desktop system that ran on top of Windows. This lawsuit was part of Apple vs. Microsoft, and Apple lost it as well. The lawsuit against DRI, however, never fully materialised, because DRI wasn’t looking for a prolonged legal battle, and as such, decided to make several alterations to GEM/1.
This resulted in GEM/2. The trash icon was altered, the desktop was replaced by two permanently open, fixed file manager windows, scrollbar blobs were made narrower, and animations were removed from the system. The goal was to please Apple into not suing the heck out of DRI, and this strategy eventually succeeded. A few small cosmetic changes, and GEM continued to exist in several forms for years and years to come.
The cool thing is that GEM had several advantages over the Macintosh, and two of those are pretty damn huge: GEM supported colour interfaces, and, more importantly, it could multitask. In other words, it had two high-profile features the Macintosh didn’t offer, much like Windows 2.0 and NewWave.
However, that’s not the common thread between Apple’s lawsuits against Microsoft, HP, and DRI. You may wonder why Apple never sued Commodore for the Amiga, which also sported a graphical user interface containing several of the elements Apple claimed ownership over. It’s actually quite simple: unlike AmigaOS and its Workbench, Windows, NewWave, and GEM all ran on DOS… And more importantly, on IBM-compatible PCs. Considering IBM was Apple’s biggest competitor, the company was adamant in ensuring the graphical user interface did not find its way to IBM-compatible machines.
That’s why the argument about copying/stealing/whatever is laughed away by those of us with an understanding of history. Apple sued Microsoft, DRI, and HP not because they felt wronged, but because they were afraid of the competition that would result from these companies bringing credible user interfaces to IBM-compatible hardware. Since the Amiga was a separate and unique hardware platform, Apple knew Commodore would not be able to compete in the long term, so it didn’t bother to sue Commodore. Apple’s fears became reality – the Amiga withered away into irrelevance and the IBM PC took over the industry – and it nearly killed Apple.
You can easily draw a parallel to today. Apple didn’t sue over WebOS or Bada (which looks virtually identical to TouchWiz, I might add); they sued Android, because it’s basically today’s IBM-compatible platform. You’ll also note that the focus of Apple’s legal actions used to be HTC, but when Samsung rose to prominence in the Android space, the South-Korean company became the focus instead. Anyone even only slightly versed in pattern recognition can see the obvious.
You know what the irony is of all this? One of the main developers behind GEM was Lee Jay Lorenzen, and get this: before joining DRI, he worked at Xerox PARC on the very same user interfaces upon which the Macintosh was built. In other words, Apple took what was partially his work, implemented it for the Macintosh, and then sued over Lorenzen’s own post-Xerox interface!
The irony is so thick here you could cut it with a knife.
That could explain a lot of what happened later.
It feels like most of the articles written by the author have a certain negative/ironic/sarcastic/judgemental character towards a particular company. We’re always hearing ‘one side of the story’.
It’s certainly ironic considering how this particular person is very judgemental of other individuals who he claims are doing the exact same thing.
You’re not doing your writing justice; there’s always good points in your articles but right now, most of it looks like trolling.
Maybe I’m paranoid, maybe it’s just me.
Yeah. Will no-one on the internets speak up for poor old benighted Apple..?
It might, not making it any less true.
When your main goal in life is to troll Apple, I think the time has come to talk a break. Yeah? Here’s The thing : only you and those who hate Apple care. If you believe that is the majority of your readership, now is the time to give up, move on an find something more constructive to do with your time. Most of the rest of us think you sound bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at.
Sent from my Nexus 7 (which I’ll point out before I get accused of being an Apple fanboi or apologist – oh, how that must piss you off..)
Facts are facts. Come up with counter-arguments, or accept that your view might not be accurate.
I have to agree; it’s not about disputing facts. I’m sure Apple ( as well as many other companies) has used shady legal tactics to disrupt or eliminate competition. But the obvious slant that this site has taken is a little too much for me. I used to enjoy reading about operating systems and other related stories, but when nearly every other story is about Apple and how evil they are, I guess it’s time to go. I’m not an Apple fan, but this is too much.
Facts are never facts, silly old chap. Wars are won by being the power that crushes all others in a conflict. History is written by the victors.
But that’s not anything to do with what I said. You know what I meant, and if you didn’t take it on board, I pity you.
Serious suggestion, take a break and chill. You’re trashing your credibility and proving to be a very sore loser.
OSNews is, and always will be, going with a flow – a flow determined by the interests of the person doing 99.9% of the news. Back when Eugenia did her thing, she had a flow too. A few months with a focus on this, then a few months a focus on that. The same applies to me. Right now, my focus is on the fact that I’m seeing history being rewritten before my very eyes, and I want to do something to counter that. That’s my prerogative as the person doing 99.9% of the work here.
I will not hide or ignore facts that are inconvenient to you. I will not go out of my way to treat Apple fans any differently from any other fans. Much like how Windows 8 and Metro get their fair share of criticism from me, or Android’s severe upgrade mess, I will not tone those down because I might step on a few toes. We’re all adults here.
If I’m ostensibly lying or presenting false information – point it out and we all learn. If you feel my opinion is wrong, argue your case – much like I have to do every day here in the comments sections. You don’t see me run away from that either. And, as always, feel free to write an article in case you want more prominence than a comment can give you. We point this possibility out time and time again, but somehow, people like you never take us up on it.
That you never take me up on the article offer, and the fact that you’re failing to come up with arguments and instead just shout BIAS! makes it very clear to me I argued my case pretty damn well with this article.
I actually agree with most of that. I have found myself agreeing with you on many things, and disagreeing on others. I often find myself defending Apple on some issue you post about, and other times the opposite. I say, for the most part, keep doing what you are doing.
That said, since you asked for points of objection about the current article…
Emphasis mine. I think that is a frankly a giant leap… Im not saying your wrong (you could be right), but the evidence you presented is definitely open to other interpretations.
Maybe they believed Amiga Workbench was different enough (it was pretty unique in many ways) that they would have trouble convincing a judge and jury to side with them on the few issues they could have attacked them on. Unlike the DRI and Windows 2.0 case, it is hard to make a case against Commodore over trade dress – workbench would never be confused with the GUI of a macintosh. They did have a “trash” icon, but it looked distinctly different than Apple’s (unlike the one in GEM which looked almost identical) Other than the trash icon, almost all the other paradigms were distinctly different than other GUIs (include Macintosh)…
Anyway, Im not defending Apple at all. Im just playing devils advocate. I think the whole trade dress thing is, for the most part, stupid and nonsensical. I just think that maybe you are going overboard reading the dregs in the bottom of the tea cup – I don’t think there is enough information to really say that Apple’s litigation history boils down purely to fear of competition.
Keep up the great work Thom.
People want to be reassured that they “made the right choice”. A lot of marketing is aimed at giving you a psychological boost directly to the emotional side of your brain to evoke strong emotions. By writing the facts, you can drive a wedge between reality and the fantasy world that has been marketed to people. At the end of the day, the facts are still the facts.
Thom, please do continue with your articles. Apple is screwing consumers; it’s a good thing you post facts so we can check if their statements are correct. So continue!
Thom, please reveal for us how many PARC engineers ended up going to work at Apple following the famous visits by Apple to Xerox PARC. I seem to recall that there definitely was cross-pollination at the time.
Apple is a company, and the only interest is the money.
Some decisions are good for all of us (webkit, bsd improvements…) and other decisions not benefit us as consumers. :-\
But instead of deleting comments, maybe you can learn something interesting from other companies:
http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html
<joke>
Unless you receive money from Google aka “Don’t be evil”. 😉
</joke>
I’m not a lawyer and don’t care me the patent war from companies.
I like C, ASM, OS programming, PICs, DIY, computers… and lately OSNews only is focused in not technical news (and always from one side)
This is my opinion and I say this from the affection I have to the OSNews site. Sorry if this is a criticism comment. But i think is better say this.
I loved my Atari ST (hey, I could afford it, unlike a Mac!), but there’s little doubt that it was largely a knock-off of the Mac interface. AmigaOS was actually very different, which just may have accounted for why they weren’t targeted by Apple. True multitasking, different look, odd things like splitting the screen into vertical slices with different resolutions, etc. – not really a Mac.
I liked GEM, and certainly the ‘update’ that split the browser into 2 fixed windows and gimped other parts pretty much insured that its days (PC) were numbered. But – especially considering that the only thing that saved Microsoft was the fine print of the licensing agreements they had – I’m not sure that Apple was wrong in trying to defend their IP. Seems like legally they had a leg to stand on (right or wrong!), and as a company that pretty much defines some of the actions they took.
Anyways, the anti-Apple slant is certainly always implied if not always stated. Indignant protests over verdicts against companies that are blatantly ripping off IP (functionally and/or window dressing and certainly look of devices) are amusing, if not really on target. I was happy to see a jury agreed that flagrant and willful copying of protected designs isn’t a legitimate business approach.
Please keep this evaluation for yourself.
Unless you have direct access to OSNews readers statistics, you have no idea what ‘most of the rest of us’ thinks.
A few years later, MacOS 7 was apparently ported to the PC… where that “superior” (or so the narrative goes – oh, and a base for Macintosh OS until 9) OS ran on top of DOS, just like Win 3.x or GEM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Icing on the cake: the CEO under which the costly m68k -> PowerPC migration happened, admitted that this was a mistake, that Apple should have went with Intel back then already…
http://macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=7045
(but it being a mistake seemingly didn’t stop the PR machine, the cult, like with the ridiculous campaign of “PowerPC ‘supercomputer on a chip’ G4″ based on a few hand-picked SIMD benchmarks)
PS. And in the general spirit of pointing out ~contemporary tech from the past – beside Newton and Tandy Zoomer there was also… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad#1990s
While seemingly a quite horrible device (links in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPad ) …that’s beside the point – all of those very early models were more or less horrible, anyway (starting with the basic idea of handwriting recognition – can you read reliably even your own handwriting, NVM from other people?)
Edited 2012-08-30 21:42 UTC
Oh dear. DRDOS is not MSDOS/PCDOS, you know that, right? DRDOS was way, way more advanced. Did you actually even read more than “system 7.1” and DOS? Most of the capabilities listed in that article didn’t come to DOS till Windows 95.
Irrelevant in the context of historical and “more loosely related” irony (you do understand the concept, right? Did you actually read even the title of my post?), NVM how “ran on top of DOS, just like Win 3.x or GEM” is 100% factual (why do you think I wrote “DOS”?) – and certainly goes against the usual “superior” narrative about all that the classic Mac OS supposedly was.
You remind me about those “bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at […] take a break and chill […] proving to be a very sore loser” words that I read somewhere in this thread…
You understand very little about what they actually did. That much is clear. DRDOS was a DOS compatible OS, but it wasn’t just a DOS clone. Do some research.
What they actually did was more akin to Windows 95.. the UI layer and shell ran as a user land process on a fully multitasking OS with drivers and a kernel. Again, DOS didn’t really manage to do most of this till version 7, which was the basis of Windows 95.
Not really, because you don’t actually seem to understand the basics of what they achieved. If all they did was make a little shell that just wrapped up DOS calls (like Windows 1.0), then maybe you’d be on to something. Read the capabilities of DRDOS, it was fcuking awesome sauce and made DOS (both MS and PC) look like a toy.
You are indeed very “bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at […] take a break and chill […] proving to be a very sore loser” – that much is clear, when you imply I couldn’t even read an article that I stumbled upon, some time ago (it’s not a quickly thrown in discovery of today, the DOS irony bit just recalled it), in my general exploration of & some interest about the old OS field.
It was running on top of a DOS (the horror! …or how the narrative went, and why it’s historically ironic), GEM or Win 3.x could ran on top of it as well.
Either way, you yourself mention it was at most like Win95 …which just shows how irrelevant what you say is, in context – Win95 was derided on the very same basis in the usual narrative.
Edited 2012-08-31 01:08 UTC
Hahaha!! Yeah, except Win 95 is a very misunderstood OS. You should look in to it. If you believe that all Win 95 was was a shell on top of DOS 7.x, you’re pretty far from reality. That may have been the popular misconception, but it is not reality.Here you go, I’ll save you the google:
Source: http://www.technofileonline.com/texts/bkw95myths.html
All of this sounds *exactly* like the situation your article describes. As I said, the DRDOS provided services, it wasn’t doing the traditional DOS role, as you implied.
Yeah, and one of the points – mentioned by me more than once already – is how silly the usual narrative about “DOS-based” Win versions was…
(but again, also historically ironic, considering 1) how it was relatively often uttered by the users of Mac OS 2) the method of that OS7 x86)
Really, it’s a high time to stop that “bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at […] take a break and chill […] proving to be a very sore loser” of yours…
LOLWUT? I think this guy has 16-bit x86 code confused with ARM Thumb or something…
Ah yes, the “G4 is supercomputer” BS – which was based solely on some outdated US export restrictions, which considered CPUs to be supercomputers if they exceeded a certain number of Gflops. By the same absurd standards, the PS2 was also considered a super computer:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=950767
For most technology companies, something that would be one of their most shameful moments. But Apple? I’m not even sure that would make the top 10 in Apple marketing hall-of-shame. After all, this is the same company that tried to make random playback sound like an amazing new feature, when the 1st-gen iPod shuffle came out:
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/20050112043302/http://web.archive.org/web/20011203234543/http://www.apple.com/
haha! I remember that. I also remember my first thought: what, the standard ipod can’t?? For real???
It can.
There likely was an app for that
Apple could not use intel chips before 2006.
simple reason: Mac OS was not CPU agnostic.
Mac OS X was. (but it came 5 years later.)
…beside fact that Intel only match SIMD part of Motorola/Apple (4 years old) AltiVec with SSE2…
that is called “piece of crap” – Apple did use AltiVec to speed up Composite Desktop in early 2000s while Microsoft made Composite Desktop in 2006. and it require DirectX 9 GPU… lol!
You do know that classic Mac OS switched from 680×0 chips to PowerPC, right?
Did Apple actually have more market share than the Amiga, at the height of it’s popularity?
Yes.
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (and 6 & 7; also, keep in mind that most of those were “toy” Amigas – perhaps irrelevant for end users, but certainly relevant WRT company outlook)
I guess it was even quite clear to some already back then that Amiga, with its very tightly coupled hardware and software, was essentially stuck at the 500 generation.
Edited 2012-08-30 22:15 UTC
Its says a lot if someone says toy. Still, even the c64 beat every computer in sales.
It says a lot if someone misses “” around “toy” – and generally how that’s just the shortest possible convenient label of that sub-category…
Whoever made those charts needs to be struck with a wet smelly sock.
Ok, I’m not fan of Apple but really, this is getting very very old. At least relegate this stuff to the side bar so the front page can carry actually interesting items.
Yeah, and I don’t see it changing. I agree with Thom, he is free to pursue whatever direction he sees fit, but that’s why I think I’m done here; this is becoming more like a blog than OS News. Not that it’s Thom’s fault, I appreciate all the work it must take, but the same point over and over is just something I’d rather do without. Cheers.
patentrantnews.com
Maybe from now on, the courts should only look at “look and feel” cases involving nakedness.
I didn’t know the future of computing went back 30 years in to the past.
Maybe if it’s relevant to today or the future, but Apple back then isn’t Apple today. It’s not like we still put up walls to keep the Roman legions out.
Still, I enjoy a bit of history even when it’s biased towards a goal of convincing an anonymous group of people that are trying to change the past.
Apple not being the same and yet being the same with knobs on seems more like it.
Apple is just the same as any other company. They want money and no competition.
When a company says it welcomes competition it’s just a way of saying “we tried our best, but couldn’t stop it”.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. –George Santayana
If that means we’ll one day again be able to buy 5.25″ floppies I’m all for it!
Thom
I, too, appreciate these articles and commentary.
Apple deserves ‘bashing’ right now. Perhaps it is singing to the choir or pissing off the vocal fan boys who post here, but I can assure you many read sites like OSNews who don’t post.
I have been coming here since the Eugenia days not signing up to actually post until just a few days ago.
Thank you.
Apple, IMHO, deserves more praise than bashing right now…ymmv.
YMMV… oh, yeah, it does, how much you can’t even imagine
These global trading days, *praise* are exprimed in a world-wide common unit, called money.
And IIRC, Apple get a lot.
Maybe it’s not enough, but for me it’s far enough and *should* be enough.
I’m not ready to move from a consumer to a believer.
I really wish it would have. They seem more and more like a crooked, anti-competitive, patent trolling company every single time they make the news these days. They’re pussies that are terrified of competition and will use downright pathetic and anti-competitive methods to kill their competition. Sorry Apple fans, I refuse to kiss their ass. This is the kind of company that should be busted for being *against* everything the U.S. economy is about. They are a business, and they are AGAINST even the idea of competition from any other business.
That sounds like Apple alright… apparently they haven’t changed over the years, they just got worse. Ironically, even according to the dead god that Apple fans worship, back when he was alive he said that his company “steals” because that’s “what great artists do.” Wow… WTF has happened to that company… sounds like the fame and money rotted their brains and they just don’t give a shit about anyone else but themselves now. Because, you know, only Apple is capable of innovating. No one else even knows what the word means if you ask them.
Edited 2012-08-31 10:06 UTC
I will not bash Thom, as some above, in fact I’d like to point out why I mostly like his stuff. From the text I went to see about GEM/2, then I found out from that page that desqview was made by quarterdeck, whom I remember from qemm-times, then checking into that I found out they also made Mosaic. So overall I came out knowing more than before.
Thom +1
“At this point Apple Computer sued DRI in what would turn into a long dispute over the “look and feel” of the GEM/1 system, which was an almost direct copy of the Macintosh (with some elements bearing a closer resemblance to those in the earlier Lisa, available since January 1983).”
From: