4 ms·
Thank you Xerox (for not Patenting the GUI)
- rbanffy 17y agoIIRC, at the time Star went to market, they couldn't patent ideas.
- teilo 17y agoWell, PARC has a history of not patenting perfectly patentable ideas. Like Ethernet.
- hga 17y agoIt's worth pointing out that the most fundamental stuff came from Douglas Engelbart's SRI group, e.g. the mouse and windows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29 Plus Xerox did sue Apple on the basis of copyright but the case was dismissed since the statute of limitations had expired. What Xerox did and didn't do when it mattered (before this) is well described by the title of a book and the book itself: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660/ http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...)
- johnohara 17y agoDoes Xerox still own the issuance of ethernet MAC addresses?
- wmf 17y agoI think it's now done by IEEE: http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml I doubt OUIs were ever a profit center anyway.
- noonespecial 17y agoI think it had a lot to do with the mentality of the day. Back then, stuff like guis was something cool that you did with patented technology, not the thing itself. Much more recently, we've begun patenting all of the ramifications of technology as well.