4 ms·
Next they try to copyright CHAT perhaps. Indeed very irritating.
by larodi 3y ago
Next they try to copyright CHAT perhaps. Indeed very irritating.
- EGreg 3y agoHow did Microsoft trademark Windows? When computer windows existed?
- stavros 3y agoPresumably because "windows" wasn't a term used to describe an OS. They didn't trademark "OS".
- blagie 3y agoWindows didn't start out as an OS. It started out as a windowing system for DOS. That's the landscape all the trademark suits happened in. Footnote: Windows 95/98/ME was still DOS + Windows bundled in one box. Windows XP was the first consumer operating system derived from Windows NT (which was in fact a proper operating system in its own right). Even Windows NT was trademark-iffy. It was a play on VMS (get it? If not, increment each letter).
- zabzonk 3y agowindows 2000 was first
- blagie 3y agoNo, Windows NT was first in the OS line. Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. There was no home / consumer / client version of Windows 2000. The versions were: Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter. Windows XP was the first convergence version, where the home / consumer / client line transitioned to the NT codebase (with Windows Server 2003 still continuing the NT server market line, but now on a common codebase, and with some of the more workstation uses moving down to the XP line).
- zabzonk 3y agoi meant that 2k preceded xp. i had a copy of 2k professional on a couple of consumer sony vaios, bought in high-street stores i.e. consumer products.
- blagie 3y agoshrug And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too. Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came out, over the 95/98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the consumer brands. At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI, Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores. Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks, more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser by design, etc.
- zabzonk 3y agono, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for. windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.
- blagie 3y ago> no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? Yes. I had plenty of friends who did. Mostly from, very likely, similar companies like the ones you worked / consulted for when they upgraded. It turns out that despite the ludicrous prices new, last-generation workstations sold for a song, or were often just found in trash piles. Corporate workstation markets aren't big into buying used. Supply and demand. At the time, the gap between a modern Wintel and a previous-generation DEC Alpha (for compute) or IRIX (for 3D) was quite large, and not in Intel's favor. X + twm or similar was much more snappy than either NT or XP. And you had the full power of Unix. Also: Multihead. Optical mice. Etc. I had one particular a friend -- a student without more income than you'd expect of a student -- who had a whole roomful of older Suns, and probably a few Vaxes (which everyone hated).
- wruza 3y agoNT/OU VMS/WNT to save you an increment.
- stevesimmons 3y agoThank you for that. It's the first time I saw the connection: WNT -> VMS. It's like HAL, the computer in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", where HAL is before IBM.
- EGreg 3y agoWow is that on purpose??
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miki123211 3y agoAlso MS (as in Microsoft) comes before NT, so you can also interpret it as NT coming after the "traditional" MS Windows?
- irb 3y agoApparently not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Naming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Naming
- edgyquant 3y agoWhat exactly do you think this page says and what is part of that comment is “apparently not” in response to?
- thaumasiotes 3y agoHere's what the page says: > It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand. One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten"). I can't figure out what this is referring to, though. Maybe you can do better.
- blagie 3y agoThe history, as I recall it: - VMS developer develops WNT, playfully incrementing each letter of his prior OS from former employer, based on similar concepts. - Corporate lawyers. - Obvious explanation vehemently denied. - Alternative explanations abound. You can believe what you want. I chose Occam's Razor.
- pavlov 3y agoThere are plenty of generic names in software that refer to some element of the product. Apple has a word processor called Pages, while Microsoft has one called Word. There were many applications before these that operated on pages and words. If the trademark is “Microsoft Windows”, it’s just as specific as “Apple Pages”.
- Tempest1981 3y agoI couldn't tell -- which of these is trademarked? - Microsoft Word - Microsoft Teams - Microsoft 365 - Microsoft Office - Apple Pages I searched here, but didn't know how to interpret the results: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/
- jameshart 3y agoMicrosoft’s own list (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWArzw https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... - PDF warning) - while it explicitly says it is non-exhaustive - doesn’t appear to claim ‘Word’ or any variant of it - only the word icons and logos. From your list it lists Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and Office 365, but not Microsoft Office.
- MadVikingGod 3y agoThanks to jameshart's list, and the search you provided I found: - Windows: No Microsoft needed https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74090419&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74090419&caseSearchType=U... - Microsoft Teams: Needs Microsoft https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87687687&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87687687&caseSearchType=U... - Nothing for Word - Microsoft 365: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87640393&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87640393&caseSearchType=U... - No Microsoft Office, but Office 365: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85387679&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85387679&caseSearchType=U...
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoTrademarks don’t apply to all contexts.
- blagie 3y agoThere was an action. It barely went Microsoft's way. You can pull on this reference trail: https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-own-windows-trademark-microsoft/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-own-windows-trademark-micro... I believe the problem is that "Window System" is generic (as in X Window System, often referred to as X-Windows). That made it hard, but not impossible, for Microsoft to defend "Windows." After enough appeals, courts decided "Window" and "Windows" aren't the same thing.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThank you for often referring to it as X-Windows. -The Window Management https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#ffe4 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...