Paul,
And then don't forget the blatant copying/theft of the Xerox PARC GUI desktop environment that Apple stole to create their GUI desktop.
--- bill
OT warning.
There I would have to disagree. I was working on still another project to create a GUI/WYSIWYG based system in that same era (skunk works project for a major word processor company at the time). We took some inspiration from the various Xerox PARC efforts, but we were inventing our own system and solving our own problems, with some decisions similar to Xerox and some different. Then Apple came out with the Lisa, and later the first Mac. Being deep in our own process, we could pretty clearly see that they were (in the big picture) doing the same thing we were - combining inspiration from PARC with our own divergent concepts, and creating a different system from scratch with nary a bit of source code in common, with a number of decisions which were different from PARC and from ours. We were hoping to have the best approach of course - but had a lot of respect for the different tradeoffs that others had made, the different paths they had taken.
From the trenches, the popular and conventional meme that Apple "stole" something from PARC is just superficial journalism which later became entrenched dogma and a morality play. It doesn't hold that much water if you look more deeply. Of course EVERY new system borrows inspiration from others - the Teensy could be said to have "stolen" from the Arduino Pro Micro or other DIP-based uC boards, given a sufficiently shallow overview. But then you'd miss the real innovation that Paul has put into it. And (as a would-have-been competitor to both Xerox and Apple), it was obvious to us at the time that Apple DID put a lot of their own innovation into their product. Some of it could perhaps have suggested ideas for our project, but much of their innovation consisted of following a different path after diverging in some of their earlier decisions. Anybody spending more than a few weeks studying both PARC's Star and the Apple Lisa in detail would see how they were different creations, with different tradeoffs from each other (and we could see, also different from our project). But the journalists just saw "looks similar, must be simple theft", which is a great narrative hook, but as I say, too shallow for an engineer to accept.
And by the way, the truly uncredited geniuses were the various LISP machines of the same era - also pioneering a GUI, mouse etc at the same time but separate from Xerox PARC. Few people know about them, because they didn't get the (superficial) popular press treatment, but they were well known and served as additional inspiration to the academics and commercial efforts of that era. PARC was not alone. There was some brilliant work done on the East Coast in the brand new GUI field, and those too were among the roots of the evolving GUI ecosystem of the time.
And of course, later Microsoft came out with their own family of GUI interfaces - once again, inspired by others, but with their own innovations. The only thing I really faulted them for was choosing a generic and widely used word as their trademark; annoying. (Likewise, say, IBM's "Personal Computer"). But Windows started from scratch, inspired by but different from anything already on the market.
Our own GUI system (from the word processing company I worked for them) never made it to market, for a variety of reasons unrelated to the technology per se. So I know that some of our own innovations (like, say, the proportional sized scroll bar tab that gives you an idea how much of a document is visible) were independently reinvented later by others, not "stolen" from us. If we had had a product out, some would assume the idea was "stolen". That means that such things were not so hard to re-invent, and being first is sometimes just "bragging rights" rather than a breakthrough nobody else would have come up with and for which one deserves eternal credit. (One Click ordering anybody?)
Anyway - having been immersed in the field during that era (but not affiliated with PARC, Apple, Microsoft nor the LISP machines), I would strongly dispute the common idea that Apple "stole" their design from PARC. They took inspiration, did their own design of a related concept with different tradeoffs, and did an overall excellent job of it.
Make no mistake, I would give a lot of credit to PARC and the LISP machine folks for their inspiring achievements! They deserve respect for their pioneering work. It certainly got us thinking, even if we took it different directions. But I'd also give some credit to Apple and even (sigh) Microsoft as well. It's time to let the oversimplied "theft" narrative go. NONE of the several GUI systems I've mentioned were "clones" of one another, each was a different attempt to create a mouse/graphical screen/icon GUI concept which was self-consistent and balanced power and simplicity. The ones that are still around was determined partly by marketing etc - but also partly by the technical skill and innovation "value added" to the very general shared concept of a GUI.
/OT
