Microsoft: So cool, it invented Apple, too
Al Gore may have invented the Internet, but Microsoft's head of research, Rick Rashid, has an even bigger claim: he invented Apple.
Speaking at a recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Rashid makes the claim that he wrote Apple before Apple was cool, as captured in All Things Digital:
If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly, I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago. If you'd asked me 25 years ago if I thought code I was [writing would be] running today on a cellphone, my reaction would have been, 'What's a cellphone?' It just shows you things really do survive and get used in interesting ways.
It also shows why the US copyright system rewards those that implement ideas, and not merely those that have ideas, or why it's critical to move beyond "mere code" to implementing it in killer products and a rising company, as Apple has.
It's nice that Rashid was involved in writing Mach, the microsystem kernel powering Mac OS X today, but I'm guessing that Rashid would have preferred to have his company follow through and write OS X, rather than Vista.
Maybe in 25 more years, Rashid.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Have you paid much attention to the copy writ suites going on these days? its not at all about implementing its about those who had an idea and registered it as vaguely as possible to put the biggest net possible out there.
I would take from his comments that the core code is 25 years old and he is surprised its still out there. But I am sure there is still code in MS that is as old or older. Some code just is good.
You're talking about patents, not copyright. The fact that you can't copyright an idea but only an implementation or expression of that idea seems to have bypassed you.
This entire article is misleading at best.
Come on, CNET, you're much better than this.
1. There is no such thing as the cloud, it is just specific servers on the internet.
2. You might want to open your eyes, Linux is running most of the servers on the internet.
Seriously, MS has it's closed code, but Apple goes one further by locking everything, including hardware - how does that fit into your open source world?
I used to think this was a blog with some credibility - now I see it's just another anti-MS rag...
Move on, nothing to see here......
Don't like the blog? Tell the CNET editors directly. Or simply stop visiting the blog. That hurts in page views which cuts down the time the advertisers get their message out. That is the way you can make your voice heard.
This comment is just another example of the verbal spew that comes from a culture of arrogance that Microsoft has failed to purge (maybe it hasn't tried?) but needs to if it's going to survive, especially if it's going to let its employees be quoted in this ever increasingly social and interconnected world where Microsoft is already perceived pretty negatively.
When Microsoft Research released Worldwide Telescope did you do a piece on how Microsoft says they invented the solar system?
Idiot.
- by Mehboob Alam October 30, 2008 4:18 PM PDT
- Matt.. it would have helped if you gave due credit to Avi Tevanian, who coded the bulk of the Mach micro-kernal and was Dr. Rashid's PhD student.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Tevanian
- Reply to this comment
-
(18 Comments)Microsoft hired Rick Rashid, after Avi turned down a job offer there and joined NeXT instead.. or so the lore goes.. (wish I could find a link to confirm this)