Re: [NTLK] Another Newton feature now available for the iPhone

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 1:05 AM, Jon Glass <jonglass@usa.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Dennis B. Swaney <romad@aol.com> wrote:
> > Internal to Apple; wasn't MS copying Mac OS items right down to the same
> > icons for the same application, only mirrored 180 degrees.
> >
>
> When the original Mac System was being built, MS was given actual code
> to the OS so they could design MS Word and Excel. Microsoft literally
> took that code, and used it in Windows 1.0 (which, incidentally, had
> Excel for it). It was that that brought the very first lawsuit, and
> first strained the relations of those two companies. It wasn't until
> Windows 3.0, however, that the flood dams broke forth. MS was then
> sued for look and feel, and lost its trash can and unified menu, as
> well as overlapping windows (from multiple apps). Although I could be
> wrong about that last part. I've seen Windows 1 and 2 in action. Trust
> me, they were no threat to Apple then. ;-)

I was programming Windows 3.1 after I learned how to program MacOS.
Everything pretty much transferred over, with the only difference being that
Win 3.1 was a crappy 640k system - although you could get it to address more
memory if you loaded in a 3rd party memory manager, of which there were a
couple - just remember that you need to switch back to 16-bit (and 20-bit
addressing) mode before you called the OS.

I was at the NT roll-out in San Francisco in '92. NT was going to replace
Windows in short order (months!) and that was going to be the end of
programs crashing other programs and/or the system. STILL waiting for
that. I really wanted to buy an Alpha-based desk"top" system with tape
back-up, but ended up buying a trip to Hawai'i and a wedding ring instead.
Should have stuck to my guns and bought the computer.

We were building a general-purpose information browser that showed not only
text but multimedia items that had a Scheme-based extension language - after
all we couldn't anticipate every sort of data and wanted folks to be able to
format things more nicely than text boxes. Also, some things were better
generated on the local computer rather than run over the (then-slow
Internet). We worried about people propagating malware, so we had a network
of trust and code-signing built in. Sound familiar? We had it running on
SunWindows, MacOS, and Windows 3.1 simultaneously. I was responsible for
programming the latter two as well as finding&fixing memory leak bugs across
the platforms.

> Their only redeeming
> feature I can remember is Excel. It was awesome wherever it was and is
> still, IMO awesome. ;-) I use OOo now, but I miss Excel, even though I
> use maybe 0.0001% of its potential nowadays.

I use excel. I use OOo. Same diff to me. What I'm sorely missing is the
special copy (some parameters in formulae kept the same, others
auto-adjusted) that I had in SuperCalc on my Osborne-1.

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Received on Wed Oct 7 10:12:16 2009