r/interesting • u/tyrion2024 • 19d ago

MISC. After Steve Jobs learned about Windows (which used a mouse & a GUI), he accused Bill Gates of stealing Apple's idea. Gates replied "Well Steve...I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox & I broke into his house to steal the TV set & found out that you had already stolen it."

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/bill-gates-steve-jobs-friends-feud-a7627431.html
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u/tyrion2024 19d ago

Early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld's description of Jobs confronting Gates...

I gradually began to notice that Neil (who worked for Microsoft) would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn't really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.
Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.
In November 1983, we heard that Microsoft made a surprising announcement at Comdex, the industry's premier trade show, held twice a year in Las Vegas. Microsoft announced a new, mouse-based system graphical user interface environment called Windows, competing directly with an earlier environment announced by Personal Software called "Vision". They also announced a mouse-based option for Microsoft Word. When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.
"Get Gates down here immediately", he fumed to Mike Boich, Mac's original evangelist who was in charge of our relationships with third party developers. "He needs to explain this, and it better be good. I want him in this room by tomorrow afternoon, or else!"
And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Unfortunately, it turned out that while the agreement that Microsoft signed in 1981 stipulated that they not ship mouse-based software until a year after the Mac introduction, that ended up being defined in the contract as September 1983, since in late 1981 we thought that the Mac would ship in the fall of 1982, and we foolishly didn't let the ship date float in the contract. So Microsoft was within their rights to announce Windows when they did. Apple still needed Microsoft's apps for the Macintosh, so Steve really couldn't cut them off.

The Macintosh wasn't released until 1984; Windows 1.0 released the following year.

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u/mfairview 19d ago

would love the same break down of msft/ibm convo about dos

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u/New-Anybody-6206 19d ago

The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley perfectly portrays both of these situations just like they happened.

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u/MelangeBot 19d ago edited 19d ago

I love how they sold IBM an operating system they did not have BEFORE they managed to find one already existing and just bought it. The originally guy that made the clone (clone of CP/M), make fuck all (like 50k or something). And they made millions and millions of dollarsion licensing fees after convincing IMB to ship their desktops with it. They made millions of doing fuck all! Sure they did ship it with qbasic and they started maintaining and further working out MSDOS and generaly speaking their first program where all very usefull. But the audacity to lie you have something and then lie to somebody so you can buy it from them and play a middleman while making milllions. Bill Gates was a hell of a cut throat business man I can tell you that.

Now let's talk about that clone of CP/M they bought. That guy also did fuck all. The real genius was Gary Kildall who did so much for computing he should be worth 50 billion dollars. (he is dead now, died at 50 in the 90s)

The entire story of computing is filled to the fucking brim with examples of this. Some genius nerd doing 95% of the work out of pure authism and passion dying poor or well at least not rich and an entire chain of sharks that made all the money on his hard work. Still the nerd died loved.

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 19d ago

authism 

I'm taking this as a portmanteau of autism and enthusiasm

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u/hangman161 19d ago

I think he means altruism?

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 19d ago

Oh certainly, but I like the new word

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u/openlightYQ 19d ago

I’m taking “dollarsion fees”, meaning fees earned for no reason by doing fuck all.

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u/ekbravo 19d ago

and the love of authorship

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u/Professional_Age8671 18d ago

I read it exactly the same way

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u/Icewind 16d ago

Or an autistic obsession with authenticity.

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u/Tupcek 19d ago

first, Bill Gates mom held a very good position in IBM, so she could easily arrange a meeting for his son. It is also almost certain Bill knew how the company thinks and thus could target their needs easily.
second, IBM didn’t really care, as they thought money is in hardware, not software. So if they could lower upfront costs, that’s big win. They also thought hardware would sell, so they can ship future models with whatever software will be cheapest at the time. Little did they knew how IBM clones will make hardware commodity, while software will be key differentiator and since they willingly gave up control of software, they opened gates for everybody else

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u/Professional_Age8671 18d ago

His mom didn't work for IBM. She was a baller who was on an executive board with the CEO of IBM. She and her husband were business TITANS in Seattle. They are way more impressive than Bill.

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u/rob132 18d ago

Yep. You can think Bill Gates dad for having a Starbucks on every corner.

​"After hearing the facts and verifying that Schultz was being dealt with dishonorably, the 6-foot-7 Gates Sr. walked Schultz across the street directly into the rival investor’s office.

Gates confronted the investor face-to-face, telling him that stealing the young entrepreneur's dream was unethical, unacceptable, and would not stand in the Seattle business community.

​Gates’ stature and reputational leverage forced the investor to immediately back down and withdraw the competing bid. "

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u/BitingSatyr 18d ago

>She and her husband were business TITANS in Seattle. They are way more impressive than Bill.

No, actually, being the founder of one of the world’s most valuable companies and for many years the world’s richest man is more impressive than that. What the fuck is wrong with Redditors, they have this compulsive need to diminish and downplay any possible accomplishment of people they don’t like, even when it’s obviously ridiculous and stupid.

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u/Professional_Age8671 17d ago

The guy was amazing. He worked endlessly for 20 years. He made the right choice much of the time and he bet big. A lot of people have done that. He started with tens of millions and rode a wave that hundreds of entrepreneurs helped generate. He just happened to be the big winner. His mom, on the other hand, had to ride against a wave of patriarchy to end up on the same board as the CEO of IBM. She is more impressive. His dad was responsible for Schultz getting Starbucks but wouldn't let anyone report on it until after his death. He is more impressive.

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u/way2lazy2care 14d ago

It was a charity board for the United Way. She's super impressive, but a woman being on the executive board of a charity wasn't some totally foreign thing. Similarly a local power lawyer helping a local business investor buy another local mid sized business is not the impressive part of the Starbucks story. That's not even the most impressive thing Gates sr did. That's the most him-just-doing-his-job thing that he did. Like you should talk to a couple local corporate lawyers if you want to be impressed.

They're both cool impressive people, but they aren't even in the same league.

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u/Royal_Success3131 18d ago

I think bill was obviously incredible. And with no peer as far as how succesful he is. But being "impressive" to me relates more to how hard they had to work and theyre specific business acumen and the challenges they faces.

I dont know anything about bill's parents so this is out of my element, but maybe thats more what they meant? Bill had his enormous success due to a lot of right place right time and more than a little shadyness. Perhaps they were more straightforward business magnates?

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u/Witchgrass 18d ago

Bill Gates mom

his son

?

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u/CrasVox 18d ago

The guy that made 86-DOS which ended up becoming MS-DOS was Tim Patterson and he was hired by Microsoft to do port and stayed on for years. They bought his prototype version of DOS for like 25 grand or something from his previous employer and they probably weren't gonna do anything with it anyway. Tho they did say they were not told by Microsoft why they wanted DOS to begin with

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u/TroyMatthewJ 19d ago

Gary died at 52 and a very rich man not Gates rich but buddy owned and flew his own jet, owned a mansion in Pebble Beach.

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u/RicketyJimmy 19d ago

The only reason you hear about those nerds is because the business guys were cutthroat and outsold the competition. For every one of those companies that succeeded, there were 99 others with the same level of nerds that failed and you never heard about them. I hope you understand what I’m saying. And I say this as a nerd who has been writing software as a professional for 16 years

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u/rob132 18d ago

QDOS. The quick and dirty operating system

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u/jbn89 19d ago

Great movie!

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u/toomanymarbles83 19d ago

I GOT THE LOOT, STEVE!

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u/daveosuave 19d ago

I shout this any time I get one over on a Steve 🤣

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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 19d ago

I remember watching that in my tenth grade Computer Programming class, it was amazing

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u/rg35xxsp 19d ago

I don't remember learning much of substance from Walter Isaacson's famous biography of Steve Jobs that I hadn't already learned first from this film many years prior.

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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 19d ago

It's interesting, I remember most of the overall story and details, but the only specific thing I remember was thinking that Woz is the only likable guy in the bunch.

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u/TheFatNinjaMaster 19d ago

Yeah. Paul Allen wasn’t too bad, either, but spent a huge part of his life fighting lymphoma on and off until it killed him.

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u/femius_astrophage 19d ago

because Issacson’s biography is terrible. he was profoundly uncurious and shallow in exploring who Steve actually was. he seems more enthralled with impressing Steve than doing the real work a biographer owes their readers. picking him as official biographer was one of Steve’s last big missteps.

such a missed opportunity

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u/shawn_martins 19d ago

Severely underrated made for TV film btw

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u/RyanTranquil 19d ago

Love that movie

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u/ashleyriddell61 16d ago

Freely available on archive.org too! Easily the best film about the rise of personal computing. Noah Wyle makes a truly scary Jobs.

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u/ecmcn 19d ago

Not DOS, but my dad led one of the ThinkPad dev teams in the 90s, and he told a story about one of their people visiting MS to negotiate pricing on Win95. This was while IBM was trying to make OS/2 a thing, which obviously was a direct shot at MS. The guy came back and described how they had these different pricing tiers for different partners, levels 1 to 5 or something, with 1 getting the best price. “Where are we?” someone asked. The answer was “somewhere between 5 and dog shit.”

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u/errydayimmarpling 19d ago

Good anecdote.

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u/Parlicoot 19d ago

RISC OS was still the best implementation of a windows system of the 3 that were widely available in the early 1980s

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u/Dik_Em 19d ago

yeah, risc is good

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u/TheDarknessWithin_ 19d ago

Scrolled too far to see this.

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u/DesignTwiceCodeOnce 19d ago

It's not coincidence that the windows 95 development team had RISC OS experience

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u/Lilja-Logason 19d ago

Seems it's all about timing.

  • Windows: 1983
  • MacOS: 1984
  • RiscOS: 1986

Same prefer as today's relevancy.

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u/OMGCluck 19d ago

Amiga: 1985

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u/quackdaw 19d ago

Windows was released late 1985. By then Digital GEM (same graphical interface used by the Atari ST) had already been available for the IBM PC for 8 months, and both the Atari and the Amiga had been released. The Amiga also supported true multitasking, which wouldn't be available on Mac and Windows until a decade later.

Of course, serious workstations like those from Xerox, Apollo (ah, good old AEGIS!) had already offered graphical desktop environments for years by the time Apple launched the Lisa, and later the Mac. But the Mac made the technology more available and somewhat affordable, and they reached the market a year earlier than competitors. I guess the real Steve Jobs magic is getting people hyped on a quite limited, somewhat overpriced and very flawed knock-off...

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u/InevitableRun9461 18d ago

Windows 1.0 was released in 1985.

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u/g0th3nburg 19d ago

RISC OS was only released in 1987. Do you mean early 90s?

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u/Quane42 19d ago

RISC OS was brilliant and so much better than Windows 3.x.

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u/oldsecondhand 19d ago

And OS/2 was better than Win95.

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u/hedoeswhathewants 19d ago

It just occurred to me this is the first thing I've ever seen talking about a Windows version prior to 3.1. I always assumed 3.1 was the first release and they just had an odd numbering scheme.

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u/Beneficial-Neat-6200 19d ago

Windows 1 was released in late '85 but developers were pretty much the only people using it for the next year or so. 3.1 was the first stable release.

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u/thunderbird32 19d ago edited 19d ago

Not entirely true. Windows 1.0x was also used in desktop publishing. Aldus PageMaker would get its start on the PC with Windows 1.0. The only decent alternative on PC at the time was (ironically) Xerox Ventura, and that used Digital Research GEM as the windowing system. Windows 2.x had true multitasking (in the 386-only version) which was pretty nice, even if it didn't sell particularly well.

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u/rfsmr 14d ago

I remember using Windows 3.0 at work.

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u/Big_Wave9732 19d ago

"You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."

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u/KingNFM 19d ago

INCONCEIVABLE!

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u/FalxIdol 19d ago

So that’s what may have inspired the scene in South Park The Movie.

It's fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here! - The General

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u/grubas 19d ago

Nah that was Win 98 infamously being crappy after Win 95 was pretty stable.

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u/FalxIdol 19d ago

Yes, I got my first laptop in 1997 that shipped with Windows 95, which had the OEM Service Release 2. That one was really stable at the time.

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u/OGBRedditThrowaway 19d ago

It might be a reference to to the infamous COMDEX '98 demonstration where a pre-release copy of Windows 98 blue-screened live on stage when Gates was trying to show off Plug and Play.

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u/FalxIdol 18d ago

Almost forgot about that one!

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u/orkichrist 19d ago

That was just based on 98 being shit.

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u/F1ibster 19d ago

98 was better than 95. Windows ME was the turd in the pool.

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u/orkichrist 19d ago

98 was horseshit pre SE just like XP pre SP2

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u/grubas 19d ago

ME was bad and then we did it again with Vista.

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u/rfsmr 14d ago

That is my memory as well.

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u/Frank_Scouter 19d ago

“but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they [microsoft] were capable of doing a decent implementation”

Reasonable take to be fair.

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u/Burpmeister 19d ago

Except Microsoft went on to dominate the PC industry for the rest of Jobs' life.

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u/Beneficial-Neat-6200 18d ago edited 18d ago

True, but that was more due to Microsoft's excellence in marketing than technology

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u/Burpmeister 18d ago

True, but that was more due to Microsoft's excellence in marketing than technology

Me when I casually rewrite history to fit my personal narrative.

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u/RaisinZRH 19d ago

Oh, some attorneys fucked up.

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u/ErikTheRed2000 19d ago

The Apple Lisa had a GUI and released a year prior to the Macintosh in January of ‘83. Due to its high price point ($10,000 in 1983 dollars) it flopped. The Macintosh replaced it. But yeah, both companies stole the GUI idea from Xerox, but Xerox never sold their GUI software

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u/SafariNZ 19d ago

Apple also paid for GUI design concept.

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u/bfitzyc 19d ago

I also love that Microsoft Word completely ripped off Word Perfect, the inventors of word processing. When The Simpsons depicted Gates of buying out Homer’s internet company, it’s almost like the writers knew his MO to a T.

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u/rfsmr 14d ago

Wordstar was around before Wordperfect from what I can remember.

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u/dysfunctionallymild 18d ago

The portrayal of this in Pirates of Silicon Valley (they moved it to be at an Apple event) is my favorite scene in the movie. For all of his famous bluster and drama, Jobs was finally outclassed by someone even more self-serving and manipulative. Gates is played as a bit of a sociopath (imo), and in that moment you want to cheer for him for pulling one over so completely over Jobs.

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u/dlogan3344 18d ago

Gates IS a ruthless cutthroat sociopathic businessman

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u/Historical_Return_40 16d ago

Watched this in a high school computer class. It is surprisingly good.

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u/Count-Bulky 16d ago

To be clear, did someone write an article to announce they read Steve Jobs’ biography?

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

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u/AwarenessNo4986 19d ago

The issue wasn't MOUSE , the issue was the whole idea of having windows to manage files

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u/be_easy_1602 18d ago

Which is also kind of dumb because a computer screen is just a window itself. And “windows” are just a virtual screen. Like how else would you manage files with a GUI? The gui needs a virtual screen… a window.

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u/AwarenessNo4986 18d ago

Have you never used DOS?