Okay, this isn’t a joke so much as something I found interesting. Apparently when our good friend Mr. Jobs accused our other good friend, Mr. Gates, of stealing interface ideas, he replied like this: “No, Steve. I think it’s more like we both have this rich neighbour named Xerox, and when you broke in to steal the TV set, you said ‘No fair, I wanted to steal the TV set first!'”

My take on it is that neither company did the right thing. However, wouldn’t a smart company learn from the other’s mistake and buy their own TV? I haven’t used or even seen the OS that was developed at Xerox, but from what I’ve read it was totally different. Apple did steal the ideas for menus, icons, and windows from Xerox, but they took it way further.

The first Lisa computer was drastically ahead of Xerox, but that’s a whole other article, and I haven’t finished the book on it yet (Insanely Great by Steven Levy, it’s pretty good so far).

Out the 10Base-T, through the router, down the T1, over the leased line, off the bridge, past the firewall . . . nothing but Net.

In case you were wondering about the A9F4 on my address, here’s the story. It’s the call for exit to shell on 68000 Macs. Don’t ask me what it means. I heard about it in MacAddict but liked another interpretation. Paraphrase: Say it slowly. A-9-F-4. Eh-nine-eff-four. Kay-nine-heffer. Canine Heffer? Dogcow!!

Go to the Menagerie of Macs #5 home page.

Short link: http://goo.gl/mlnqZJ