Re: Next Gen QL…
Posted: Sun May 08, 2022 8:15 pm
Apples business model is to be second to market. The first person generally fails in tech. This was true of MP3 players and smart phones in the modern era too!
That work wasn't exactly "free". Apple apparently paid with an option into 100 000 of their own shares (roughly 1M$ at that time, roughly 16M$ after emission, roughly 10 Billions today) as an entry fee to PARC. Whether the visit and the investment were connected, is disputable, however.Silvester wrote:Re: tofro Xerox reference
IIRC there was an early documentary on Steve Jobs (CH4?) which pointed out that although Xerox PARC spent a lot of money recruiting bright post-grads to envision what the electronic office would be like (and came up with WIMP environment), they didn't use it themselves but generously made it public for free. Apple were happy to use that free work, and Steve Jobs happy to be freely mentored by the great Robert Noyce, but then over zealously protected his own company's work (just google 'Steve Jobs' + 'destroy'*).
(* It wasn't just the Android thing, it was that he wanted to dominate concepts like iPad and iPhone)
Interesting, I never heard that. The documentary gave the impression the research was released free to use. So it begs the question why did Apple make such a contribution where others, who subsequently also used the WIMP concept, did not.tofro wrote:That work wasn't exactly "free". Apple apparently paid with an option into 100 000 of their own shares (roughly 1M$ at that time, roughly 16M$ after emission, roughly 10 Billions today) as an entry fee to PARC. Whether the visit and the investment were connected, is disputable, however.
Apple never got there, nor the NeXT. 68040 was end of line for all of them.Derek_Stewart wrote:I had thoughts about a Q60Cube, but it seemed that I was too late as Apple had got there first.