I see you have a time machine too.

If you’re not going to believe a first-hand witness like Andy Hertzfeld, nothing will convince you, ye ol’ FUDmeister.

He is also under contract to both Microsoft and SCO to smear the opposition or in any way possible rattle them. These are not hidden facts. Not more than back page news.

Rob Enderle is just trying to piss you off – and he seems to have succeeded.

Wake up before night falls.

While you were in diapers, I was selling, supporting and repairing Macs and had regular contact with Apple. They were very tight with MS at the time and collaborated on many things.

Not having been in Apple, I may not have the inside scoop, but it was pretty common knowledge that they worked closely.

Rainy Day’s comments are really quite sad. You can wipe the foam from your mouth but it’s still quite clear you are rabid!

MW: “Around,” as someday i’ll get around to proof reading more carefully!

Your version of the facts makes much more sense than Rob Enderle’s version.

Okay, here’s what really happened: After Steve Jobs (SJ) invented the Time Machine (TM) – you know, the one he uses to go into the past and steal ideas from M$ to put into MacOS before M$ can put them into Windoze – a horrible malfunction occurred in the TM sending SJ not only very far back in time, but also into the fictional reality of Middle Earth. There SJ was, stuck amid this massive battle between Mordor and just about everybody else in Middle Earth, but he didn’t realize it because Mordor seemed so very much like Redmond, and the Dark Lord had an uncanny resemblance to Bill Gates. Anyway, it was actually a collaboration of Elfs, Hobbits and a wizard named Gandalf who created the Macintosh. (It is Gandalf’s contribution to the Mac, by the way, which many believe give it its special magical quality.) SJ was eventually able to return to 1984, with the help of Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, who had actually had some experience with time travel before (using a Delorian made into a time machine†).

So that, my friends, is the real story of how the Mac was created! Remember, you heard it here first.
________________________
† According to Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, what most folks don’t realize is that no special effects were used in the production of the movie Back to the Future as the Delorian really was a time machine. That’s how they were able to make the 1955 scenes look so very realistic: They were actually filmed in 1955!

An interesting aside is that Paul Thurrott claims Microsoft actually wrote the software for the Delorian. This theory, however, has been discredited by the facts that: 1) The time-machine Delorian, if it really exists and this theory is true, obviously works, and therefore could not have any M$ products in it, and 2) The Delorian actually has no software.

He wrote: “Microsoft did, in fact, help Apple create the first Mac OS. And they did, in fact, have a big say in how the UI turned out. For example, Microsoft was responsible for making the default button in dialogs (“OK” in a dialog with OK/Cancel choices) bold and, thus, more obvious to the user.”

I have read dozen books about history of Apple Computer and so far I haven’t seen a single piece of fact to support Thurrott’s claim. It’s not true.

It so sad when people make claims when they don’t have the facts to support them.

Their “collaboration,” if you really want to call it that, was to develop their own third party app’s. Nothing more.

Give it up, Mr. Enderle, Principal Analyst of the one-man “Enderle Group.” While i don’t think Oswald acted alone, in this case, there’s nothing shrouded in mystery, no magic bullets, no grainy 8mm film, no missing frames, no shadowy figures in a grassy knoll. All very straightforward and easy to comprehend.

http://tinyurl.com/ak7oh

http://tinyurl.com/dftf6

Wait a minute you’re telling me that without any collaboration an OS and the primary applications stack can be built and then magically be ready on the day of launch? Wow, do believe in the tooth fairy too? Seriously, if Microsoft had the option of providing the applications stack 6 to 12 months later this could have worked but Microsoft was the launch partner. And if Microsoft appropriated code, how did they actually get “source”? You can’t have it both ways, either they were sharing source or they weren’t. There was a lawsuit over the IP surrounding a windowed OS, show me the transcript where anyone said code was copied. The code base for Windows and the Mac was dramatically different; the look and feel was similar and formed the basis of the litigation which Apple and later Xerox (who had a better case but waited too long) lost.

Rob Enderle
Principal Analyst
Enderle Group

Widely known? You shouldn’t believe everything you hear while institutionalized for schizophrenic delusional psychotic episodes. Not only are the other patients unreliable, but your own recollection as well.

That M$ had anything to do with writing Mac OS is 100% pure bullshit, and all the revisionist history in the world will not make it so. I know, i was watching Apple very closely at the time… hell, i even went to work for them in 1987. There is not one shred of truth to this. It is all fantasy; Bill Gates’ wet dream.

Any software engineer familiar with the original Macintosh Toolbox and M$’s Windoze 1.0 knows that M$ could not possibly have had a hand in developing, much less writing, the Mac OS. Mac code is far better written than anything M$ was capable of. The Mac Toolbox was written by real software engineers, not buffoons.

Real software engineering is something which has never been practiced by M$ (except perhaps in the last 14 months). I know. While at Apple, i interviewed many M$ engineers looking for work at Apple. I’d ask them what it was like writing code for M$. They would tell me horror stories of such atrocious coding practices that any decent programmer wanted out of the environment. Horrible programming practices were not only the norm, but institutionalized and enshrined, and any attempt to apply real engineering practices was belittled, ridiculed, and empathetically beat down. The utter crap which is Windoze is not, as many claim, a necessary evil “because they support so many different hardware configurations” (Unix does it with grace), but because of their total and complete lack of appreciation and utter disregard for the value of disciplined code writing practices. NO OTHER REASON. That is why Windoze is the virus infested, buggy, stinky, smelly pile of dogshit it is.

The notion that M$ had more OS experience than Apple at the time is equally absurd. In the early 80’s, when the Macintosh was being developed, M$ had relatively little OS experience (of course one might argue they still don’t!); most of their experience at the time was limited to porting other’s OS’s, IIRC, and not actually writing OS’s. By then Apple had Apple ][ DOS, Pascal, Apple /// SOS, Lisa OS, and was finishing ProDOS. [Note: I’m not sure how much of Apple ][ Pascal OS might have came from the folks at UCSD.] I suspect that Apple had far more OS experience than M$ at the time! I think they still do.

As for the notion that the Mac OS was licensed to M$, i’ve never heard that before, and think it is merely urban legend. Again, M$ code of that era was so poorly written, i don’t see how this can possible be true. More than likely the person who mentioned that was thinking of the non-disclosure agreement that M$ signed which gave them an advance peek at the Mac. M$ took that as a license to steal, but that’s hardly “licensing the code.” Incidentally, this has been SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for M$ over the years. Sign NDA’s, cuddle up to a company, then rip them off. They especially like to do this to small companies without the financial resources to sue them.

These two recollections by Andy Hertzfeld pretty much sums it all up, and should put to rest any notion that M$ was in any way involved in the development of the Macintosh (other than to rip-off Apple, and to write some third party app’s):

http://tinyurl.com/ak7oh

http://tinyurl.com/dftf6

If you repeat a lie enough times, eventually people will begin to believe its true. Its a FUD technique.

I wasn’t there when all of this happened, but I am much more inclined to believe Andy Hertzfeld’s account since he was there and he was the one who did a great deal of the work. Read his account at folklore.org. Remember that Fudmeister was not there, but Andy Hertzfeld was. Not Rob Enderle.

Actually, Enderle did edit his original sentence. But even his edit is false, as is your statement. Microsoft and Apple did NOT collaborate on the Macintosh operating system. Apple created the hardware, OS, and various applications. Microsoft wrote other applications. That’s it.

Sadly, both seem to be true, unless Enderle just edited his story before I read it. The “offending” sentence is the second one in the third paragraph. It reads thusly:

“It is interesting to note, and few seem to remember, that Microsoft helped Apple write the first MacOS under a project code named “sand” http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm over two decades ago, but, like most Apple partnerships, this one ended badly.”

He says that they HELPED WRITE the first MacOS, which is true — it was a widley known fact at the time. It was that collaboration, and the clevely written contracts, that allowed MS to rip off the interface and win when Apple sued them for it.

Regardless the flavor of the slant I detest bias and am sadly disappointed by MDN. I am also dissappointed by the readers with their flame-throwers always at the ready, always ready to provide journalists with an easy example of Mac users as crackpot fanatics.

I’ve had enough. So long. Perhaps I will look in from time to time, to see if anyone has graduated from Junior High.

___________________________________________________
Rob,

I see that you edited your site, but it’s still completely inaccurate. Microsoft wrote absolutely no part of the Mac OS. They did write the first applications for the Mac, but none of the OS. To say that they did would be like saying Sony helped invent the automobile because they make car stereos.

I find it strange that you decided to point this out, regardless of the fact that it was completely wrong, yet you missed the fact that Microsoft did indeed include Mac OS source code in Windows, so it could be said that Apple helped write Windows, although not on purpose.

I sincerely hope that you’ll edit your article again, and try in the future to do some research before making such baseless claims. I’d also suggest you visit the thread at MacDailyNews (http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/7055/) regarding this article because there are several people there who actually know the facts and have written them up very succinctly.

- Nick
____________________________________________________________

And here is what I just got back from him:

____________________________________________________________
They collaborated with Apple on the MacOS, they did the application side Apple did the OS but information flowed both directions to insure the applications actually ran and, without the applications, the Mac would have probability failed as Commodore and Atari did. Did they write one line of Mac code? Possibly but the point is that they helped Apple create a better product and were vastly more expert at tools and OSs then Apple was at that time. The two firms started out, as I’m sure you know, very close. The Mac code in Windows was something I’d never heard before but that would suggest that they did write some code as they had to get it somehow. The code base between the Mac and Windows was otherwise very different.

I’ve looked at the posts and reread the histories I have access to this is accurate. I did screw up with the first post, was simply running way too fast that morning for my own good, but believe this is now factually accurate. To help someone do something doesn’t mean you actually did any of it, but the help is clear when you look at the depth of the Sand project and how closely the firms had to work to make it, and the Mac, successful.

Rob Enderle
Principal Analyst
Enderle Group
___________________________________________________________

If I didn’t shave my head I’d be tearing my hair out. Rob certainly has a singular way of looking at things, doesn’t he? I can’t decide whether to write back to him again or just let it die for the sake of sanity.

Ampar, macman is most likely refering to the case cracker. After you removed the torx screws with a long tool (needed at least a 6.5 inch tool, but I found a 10 inch tool more useful) you needed something to pry the back part (the two sides, back and top were an integral piece) from the front. There were specific tools sold by third parties to do this relatively easily. For one example of a case cracker (actually the kind I have stuffed in my history closet along with my original 1200 baud Apple modem [my wife refers to it as my junk closet]) see: http://www.tecratools.com/pages/datacom/computer.html Scroll down and look at Part # 17290, Long Reach Torx Driver and Part # 42190, Mac Case Cracker.

Memorable quotes:
Gates: “The coolest product being done in the industry today is Xbox 360. The most important work being done in the industry today, you could say is our work in security.”

Gates: “An important element is the breadth of the partnerships we have. … Windows has brought a certain simplicity to IT people, developers and consumers. Now what they expect of Windows, in terms of built-in security, built-in management, built-in modeling, built-in speech recognition. …”

Ballmer: “Built-in search, built-in anything.”

Q: “‘Built-in anything,’ you said, Steve. Is there a risk of running afoul of antitrust authorities again if you continue to follow that strategy?”

Like they care.

I was trying to say that Enderle is confusing AppleSoft BASIC with the Mac OS and that while Microsoft did write AppleSoft BASIC, they didn’t write the Mac OS.

macman: Special tool? Ahh, you meant this – http://www.micromac.com/products/macopener.html for removing the Torx screw.

Special tool could also describe self-proclaimed technology experts.

what a joke!!

HEHE!

THE BULLSHITING LIES AND FUD IS FLOWING THICK TODAY!

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Hear audio excerpts from the interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (all in MP3 format):
- The Google threat (2:30, 2.28MB)
- Gates on the future (0:44, 698K)
- ‘The cool factor’ (2:17)
- Business models (0:30, 472K)
- Succession at Microsoft (1:19, 1.2MB)
- Gates’ dance prowess (0:27, 418K)

Microsoft’s chairman and its chief executive also expressed confidence that the company can expand successfully beyond its dominant Windows and Office franchises into everything from video games to business software.

That scope has caused some in the company to question whether Microsoft is trying to do too much. But Gates and Ballmer say they see it as a strategic advantage — and a key differentiator between Microsoft and companies such as Google.

“We both believe in hiring smart people, but the breadth of what they’re working on is not nearly as broad as what we do,” Gates said.

Those were among the observations by Gates and Ballmer during an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Friday at Safeco Field, where more than 17,000 Microsoft employees had gathered for their annual meeting.

Edited excerpts:

Q: You spent time today looking back at the first 30 years of the company. Would you look ahead five years to what you expect Microsoft to be like in terms of its size, its product mix, things along those lines?

Gates: Most of the things that will be big within five years are the things we’re working on today, and so the Xbox, the way that redefines the home environment, some of the ways we’re thinking about the office and the software working there. The key research things we’re doing, we’ve been lucky enough to be able to invest in.

Some of the divisions, like Business Solutions, the search work we’re doing, in five years those ought to be darn good businesses, not only in size, even in profitability. Certainly that’s the bet we’re making today. … People will finally be telling me I was right about the Tablet PC in five years. A lot of continuity. I don’t see any discontinuity in this five-year period.

Ballmer: Not only are we going to be selling a lot of software, but we’re going to be selling a lot of (software) subscriptions on the Internet — large companies as well as consumers. We’re going to be selling a lot of advertising, because advertising is going to be important for funding. So our business models will evolve. We’ll have more new business models in the next five years. I’m sure we’ll have growth. We’ll have growth in the Puget Sound, we’ll have growth outside the Puget Sound.

Q: How do see yourself stacking up against an emerging company like Google?

Gates: Google is actually pretty narrow in what they’re doing today. Now, they’re going to probably go into some new areas, but the idea of great developer tools, great operating systems, great productivity tools, they’re not in any one of those areas. …

Google is a company that hires software talent. … So there’s some similarities. We both believe in hiring smart people, but the breadth of what they’re working on is not nearly as broad as what we do.

Read more at the link. I had a good laugh too!

http://tinyurl.com/cbh6

Read up on what SAND *really* means here:

< http://tinyurl.com/cxbh6 >

Makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?

Mike

The second part of his BS is claiming that somehow that relationship ended badly. Considering the Mac BU is writing Mac software to this day and that the work on the Mac led directly to the current Office software that Microsoft makes $billions on, I don’t see how it ended at all much less badly.

I hope someone captured a copy of that page before he edited it. What an idiot but it ought to be preserved for history anyway.

The one product line that Apple has which is dominant in its space, runs on Windows (iPod) and Apple has been, over time, making their PC platform more and more interoperable with Microsoft’s which has helped it survive.

So, I guess one product that runs on Windows is survival for Apple in Rob’s world. His delusions are growing as he keeps drinking that M$ koolaid.

I honestly believe that he isn’t quite that stupid, but instead he is trolling for hits on his web page

Every post here points out obviously that Enderle wrote a piece of crap about the Mac OS’s MS connection. That moron obviously puts out stuff without careful analysis. I am not even sure if he’s capable of doing that.

The only question I have is..do you think he reads MDN? If he does, then he should admit his error and put out a correction to his misstatement in a related article. But I kind of doubt if he reads MDN, which means, all of you MDN posters here with a great piece to say about his stupid mistake should flood him with email to let him know he’s an IDIOT and to force him to recant. Else, his misstatement will spread more damn lies and feed the dark side with the “I told you so” posturing.

1/24/84 Microsoft takes a leading role in developing software for the Apple Macintosh computer. The company ships Microsoft BASIC and Microsoft Multiplan simultaneously with the introduction of the Macintosh. Microsoft also announces that Word, Chart, and File will ship soon.
Microsoft’s original software development work for Macintosh was code-named “SAND” for “Steve’s Amazing New Device”

Apparently Rob takes this app development to mean OS development. Or maybe he is just trolling! Hard to believe he is really this thick.

Yes, of course! Apple shipped the Mac with no operating system for over 18 months while waiting on Microsoft to bail them out with Microsoft writing the Mac system software and delivering it in October 1985!

He can’t even read the calendar right!

(I’ll calm down now.)

Back then Microsoft put as many applications as they could onto the Mac after it started shipping.

Also please note in the history given above that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with licensing the Macintosh System Software to Microsoft. It was all Scully.

Enderle’s got it completely backwards (surprise!).

Apple employees wrote the Macintosh System Software (it was not called Mac OS back then). I’ve got my 0.9x software disk around here somewhere (probably tucked away with my 0.9x AOL disk).

Now for the more interesting twist…
Gates was quite infatuated with the Mac. He made several statements — publicly — that the Mac was where computers were headed after the Mac started shipping. After the Mac shipped he made some truly gushing statements in favor of the Mac.

However…
Before the Mac started shipping Microsoft was shown the Mac and its capabilities. Microsoft was interesteded in bringing new software to the Mac including new stuff that would not run well under MS-DOS (back then there were several different versions of DOS for the Intel platform — MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc. but I digress). Apple was very interested in getting the new software onto the Mac, e.g., the first version of Excel, the first windowed version of Word, etc.

Additionally, Microsoft’s GUI layer to go over top of MS-DOS (Windows) was going badly — it was in real trouble.

Then Gates, as only Gates has been able to do (until Steve came back to Apple at least), played hardball and bluffed just like he did with IBM. Gates told Scully that Microsoft would do absolutely NO development work on applications for the Mac unless Apple licensed the SOURCE CODE to the Macintosh System Software to Microsoft.

Scully caved. He was worried about having a new platform out there with very little software to run on it. Scully authorized the licensing of the source code of the Macintosh System Software to Microsoft. The license read that Microsoft got to use the source code in Microsoft Windows version 1.0 and subsequent versions. (That’s right… Microsoft licensed the Mac source code so they could put select pieces of this source code into Windows. Without it Windows would have been significantly delayed.)

Microsoft finished the development of several applications for the Mac (Word, Excel, etc.) and even went out and licensed some other applications to market under the Microsoft name for the Mac platform (e.g., Absoft’s compilers which were written by Absoft but marketed by Microsoft as Microsoft compilers even though Microsoft did not write any of them).

So the reality is that Apple actually wrote part of the first version of Windows.

But it does not stop there.

Apple found out that some of that same source code showed up in Windows 2.0. Apple complained loudly stating the contract only allowed Microsoft to use the source code in 1.x versions of Windows (Apple’s understanding of the “and subsequent version” clause). (I don’t remember the exact wording of the clause, and it’s been over 15 years since I’ve seen a copy of the wording. I’m just using the wording “and subsequent versions” because that’s how I remember it. The wording was something along those lines, but probably much more “legaleze”.)

Microsoft claimed the “and subsequent versions” meant that they could include the Macintosh source code in versions 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, etc. since they were all “subsequent versions”.

Apple sued.

Apple’s lawyers then convinced Scully that they should expand the suit to cover the “look and feel” of the Mac too. The lawyers had won a landmark suit against Franklin and thought they could keep Microsoft from making anything even closely resembling the Mac user interface. Scully approved of the expansion of the suit to include the “look and feel” aspects of the suit.

The suit became known as the “look and feel” lawsuit and the original issues about the source code and Microsoft rights (or lack thereof) to the source code were almost completely ignored… except for one small event. When Windows 3.0 shipped Apple claimed it had some of the original Macintosh System Software source in it too. Apple relatively quickly added Windows 3.0 to the suit.

We all know what happened… The media and the judge focussed on the silly look and feel part of the suit (very likely because Microsoft focussed on it because that may have been the only part Microsoft thought they could win). Microsoft won on ALL counts — source code issues and look and feel issues.

It’s no coincidence that Windows 95 (the first Windows version to even closely look like the Mac interface) came out AFTER the judge’s ruling.

So the reality is that Microsoft wrote absolutely NO part of Apple’s Macintosh System Software. The reality is that Apple wrote part of at least Windows 1.x, 2.x and 3.x.

MW: actually
As in… Some one should *actually* take a copy of the original contract where Microsoft licensed the source code to the Macintosh System Software and bludgeon Enderle with it.

Our dirty hippy dorks can beat up their dirty hippy dorks

For those that wonder why MDN posts these idiot Enderle articles…
…here’s your sign.

When I refered to the Woz job with the disk drivers, I didn’t exclude all the genious he did to all the Apple I and ][ projects. I just tried to illustrate one of the skills this brillant guy have.

Andrew Hamilton
Las Vegas Videographers
Hamilton International Productions
http://www.hiproductions.com