| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| Apple vs. DRI: the other look-and-feel lawsuit |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-30 17:43:01 |
| We all know about Apple's look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 2.0, but this wasn't the only look-and-feel lawsuit Apple filed during those years. Digital Research, Inc., the company behind GEM, also found itself on the pointy end of Apple's needle. Unlike the lawsuit against Microsoft, though, Apple managed to 'win' the one against DRI. |
|
| wow, even more |
| By Soulbender on 2012-08-30 22:58:22 |
| Ok, I'm not fan of Apple but really, this is getting very very old. At least relegate this stuff to the side bar so the front page can carry actually interesting items. |
 - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: More irony (though more loosely related) |
| By zima on 2012-08-30 23:06:29 |
|
Irrelevant in the context of historical and "more loosely related" irony (you do understand the concept, right? Did you actually read even the title of my post?), NVM how "ran on top of DOS, just like Win 3.x or GEM" is 100% factual (why do you think I wrote "DOS"?) - and certainly goes against the usual "superior" narrative about all that the classic Mac OS supposedly was. You remind me about those "bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at [...] take a break and chill [...] proving to be a very sore loser" words that I read somewhere in this thread... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: wow, even more |
| By helix on 2012-08-30 23:40:45 |
| Yeah, and I don't see it changing. I agree with Thom, he is free to pursue whatever direction he sees fit, but that's why I think I'm done here; this is becoming more like a blog than OS News. Not that it's Thom's fault, I appreciate all the work it must take, but the same point over and over is just something I'd rather do without. Cheers. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: More irony (though more loosely related) |
| By henderson101 on 2012-08-31 00:33:19 |
|
> certainly goes against the usual "superior" narrative about all that the classic Mac OS supposedly was. You understand very little about what they actually did. That much is clear. DRDOS was a DOS compatible OS, but it wasn't just a DOS clone. Do some research. What they actually did was more akin to Windows 95.. the UI layer and shell ran as a user land process on a fully multitasking OS with drivers and a kernel. Again, DOS didn't really manage to do most of this till version 7, which was the basis of Windows 95. > You remind me about those "bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at [...] take a break and chill [...] proving to be a very sore loser" words that I read somewhere in this thread... Not really, because you don't actually seem to understand the basics of what they achieved. If all they did was make a little shell that just wrapped up DOS calls (like Windows 1.0), then maybe you'd be on to something. Read the capabilities of DRDOS, it was fcuking awesome sauce and made DOS (both MS and PC) look like a toy. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: More irony (though more loosely related) |
| By zima on 2012-08-31 01:03:53 |
|
You are indeed very "bitter, broken and have a bunch of straws you are desperately clutching at [...] take a break and chill [...] proving to be a very sore loser" - that much is clear, when you imply I couldn't even read an article that I stumbled upon, some time ago (it's not a quickly thrown in discovery of today, the DOS irony bit just recalled it), in my general exploration of & some interest about the old OS field. It was running on top of a DOS (the horror! ...or how the narrative went, and why it's historically ironic), GEM or Win 3.x could ran on top of it as well. Either way, you yourself mention it was at most like Win95 ...which just shows how irrelevant what you say is, in context - Win95 was derided on the very same basis in the usual narrative. Edited 2012-08-31 01:08 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Stephen! |
| By yester64 on 2012-08-31 01:07:00 |
| Its says a lot if someone says toy. Still, even the c64 beat every computer in sales. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Comment by Stephen! |
| By zima on 2012-08-31 01:12:52 |
| It says a lot if someone misses "" around "toy" - and generally how that's just the shortest possible convenient label of that sub-category... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Stephen! |
| By tylerdurden on 2012-08-31 01:14:32 |
| Whoever made those charts needs to be struck with a wet smelly sock. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[4]: dear Thom |
| By galvanash on 2012-08-31 02:00:13 |
|
I actually agree with most of that. I have found myself agreeing with you on many things, and disagreeing on others. I often find myself defending Apple on some issue you post about, and other times the opposite. I say, for the most part, keep doing what you are doing. That said, since you asked for points of objection about the current article... > Apple sued Microsoft, DRI, and HP not because they felt wronged, but because they were afraid of the competition that would result from these companies bringing credible user interfaces to IBM-compatible hardware. Since the Amiga was a separate and unique hardware platform, Apple knew Commodore would not be able to compete in the long term, so it didn't bother to sue Commodore. Emphasis mine. I think that is a frankly a giant leap... Im not saying your wrong (you could be right), but the evidence you presented is definitely open to other interpretations. Maybe they believed Amiga Workbench was different enough (it was pretty unique in many ways) that they would have trouble convincing a judge and jury to side with them on the few issues they could have attacked them on. Unlike the DRI and Windows 2.0 case, it is hard to make a case against Commodore over trade dress - workbench would never be confused with the GUI of a macintosh. They did have a "trash" icon, but it looked distinctly different than Apple's (unlike the one in GEM which looked almost identical) Other than the trash icon, almost all the other paradigms were distinctly different than other GUIs (include Macintosh)... Anyway, Im not defending Apple at all. Im just playing devils advocate. I think the whole trade dress thing is, for the most part, stupid and nonsensical. I just think that maybe you are going overboard reading the dregs in the bottom of the tea cup - I don't think there is enough information to really say that Apple's litigation history boils down purely to fear of competition. |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE[5]: More irony (though more loosely related) |
| By henderson101 on 2012-08-31 02:44:24 |
|
Hahaha!! Yeah, except Win 95 is a very misunderstood OS. You should look in to it. If you believe that all Win 95 was was a shell on top of DOS 7.x, you're pretty far from reality. That may have been the popular misconception, but it is not reality.Here you go, I'll save you the google: > Windows 95 actually runs on top of DOS. Microsoft was lying when it said Windows 95 got rid of DOS entirely. Or: Windows 95 doesn't need DOS at all. You boot up right into Windows, and you only use DOS to run old DOS programs. Both are wrong. Microsoft isn't guilty of lying; it's guilty of overhyping Windows 95 in the year before the new operating system was released. Windows doesn't run on top of DOS; it runs with the help of some old (and fully debugged) code that is essentially DOS code. Given the tradeoffs involved -- developing a reasonably stable system that could handle 16-bit Windows programs, 32-bit Windows programs and DOS programs without taking up huge amounts of memory -- Microsoft probably did the right thing by continuing to use much of the same code it employed in Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11). Windows 95 cannot run without that code (the so-called DOS services), and, in fact, cannot even boot up without that code. This does mean that much of the underlying code in Windows 95 is 16-bit code, and this is why Windows 95 is properly termed a 16/32-bit system and not a true 32-bit operating system. Could Microsoft have changed most of that 16-bit code to 32-bit code? Of course. But for what purpose? Much of that code is unavoidably 16-bit in instruction length, so making each instruction 32 bits long would add 16 zero bits to one end of each piece of code. This would waste memory (and possibly even slow down some operations) without gaining anything useful. (DOS services do not need to use instructions more than 16 bits long, in other words.) So Windows 95 needs DOS in the sense that it needs the DOS services. It doesn't need DOS itself, if you think of DOS as the command prompt. Source: http://www.technofileonline.com/... All of this sounds *exactly* like the situation your article describes. As I said, the DRDOS provided services, it wasn't doing the traditional DOS role, as you implied. |
| - Score: 1 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |