Programming Windows: Pre-History (Premium)

In the 1970s, the software wizards at Xerox Parc pioneered the future of computing by implementing a graphical user interface, or GUI, that allowed users to manipulate on-screen objects---windows, buttons, and other widgets---using a mechanical device called a mouse instead of just the keyboard. In an age of text-only displays, Xerox had accomplished something that was truly magical.

But the firm failed by not successfully commercializing its inventions.

It did so by showing these inventions in 1979 to Apple, which promptly took Xerox’s ideas, expanded on them, and developed its own GUIs. First for the Lisa, which was overly expensive, aimed at the business market, and a failure. And then later for the Macintosh, which likewise failed in the market until desktop publishing and the first laser printer rescued it from oblivion in the late 1980s.

Apple announced and then released the first Macintosh in 1984, but the product had been in development for at least two years before that. (An earlier, entry-level computer that was also named Macintosh notwithstanding.) Its innovations, especially in the personal computing space, span a long list. Instead of a text-based display, the Macintosh used a bitmapped graphics display. Individual applications appeared in floating, resizable, and overlapping windows, instead of fully occupying the screen. The interface was optimized for manipulation via mouse, not the keyboard.

As a major vendor of developer tools for microcomputers and a blossoming software application provider, Microsoft played a very visible role in the Macintosh launch. The firm, at the time, supported every personal computing platform available with its software development tools, especially BASIC, and was quickly expanding the reach of its productivity software as well. So, it quickly ported both Multiplan and Word to the Macintosh, and then later released Excel first on Macintosh.

“Macintosh allows us to write software that is significantly easier to use,” Microsoft CEO Bill Gates said in 1984, referring to that system’s GUI. “What it delivers for its cost is really great. If this machine can’t make it, I don’t know what can.”

Gates, as excited by anyone about the future on display with this platform, predicted that half of Microsoft’s 1984 revenues---as much as $50 million---would come from the Macintosh.

That didn’t happen. But less well-known than Microsoft’s early support of the Macintosh, perhaps, was that the company also worked secretly with Apple to help it define the Macintosh user interface. It defined such widgets as radio buttons and dialog boxes, and it suggested the double-wide outline around default buttons. This gave it both an outsized influence on the new system and important experience with GUIs, which were still quite new at the time.

This partnership made sense: Gates really did believe that the Macintosh would be successful and would drive future revenues. And because...

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