[quote=quote]They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future and that Microsoft (MSFT) had just as much right as Apple (AAPL) did to pursue the desktop metaphor idea that had, after all, had been originally developed at Xerox PARC (XRX), not at Apple. As he freely admitted later, “We sort of say, ‘hey, we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto, too’.”
In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would not create graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in January 1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights when he revealed, in November 1983, that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for IBM PCs — featuring a graphical interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-click navigation — called Windows.[/quote] So, not only did Apple not invented GUI (which I knew), but they didn’t create all of their first GUI (Microsoft created portion of it for them, this I didn’t know).
