r/interesting • • 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
27.1k Upvotes

552 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

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.”

1

u/errydayimmarpling 19d ago

Good anecdote.