dtherio,

Maybe I should go back to school? I think that you need a brush up yourself. 1979 comes after 1973. In 1979, Jobs and others visited PARC to check out the GUI that was pioneered there by Xerox several years before in 1972-1973. In fact, Jobs gave Xerox some stock options in order to be let in the door.

When I first used a Mac Classic in late 1986/early 1987, I noticed right away that the screen appearance appeared to be pretty similar to that of the Xerox Star Station my wife used. In fact, I and others called it the Star Station's cute little brother.

Raskin, who was a principal player in the development of the Mac, only conceived of ideas related to a graphical user interface prior to Xerox's Alto computer system being built, just as Arthur C. Clarke conceived of men walking on Mars fifty years ago. Did he put together a programming language (like Xerox's Smalltalk) that would have facilitated such a revolutionary interface in the 60's? No. Raskin, although a brilliant man, is somewhat put off that Apple came out second with a small computer system that used a GUI/mouse combination.

On the other hand, one of Raskin's goals was to have such a computer system actually be affordable for the common person. In that, Apple was truly the pioneer. The Mac I used was definitely affordable. The Star Station, on the other hand was upwards of $17,000 each. Ouch!

But the Star Station did have a really cool mouse. My wife reminded me last night that it was an optical mouse. It used a red LED and a hard, gray mouse pad with an imbedded grid of dots. I remember trying to use it off of the mouse pad and the cursor would barely move.

"By definition, monopoly is characterized by an absence of competition."

Players - You mentioned Zune, Sandisk, and there's Samung YP-U3, Toshiba, Sony, etc. Oh, and did you know about all the cell phones that play music and Sprint lets you download straight to the phone.

Music Stores - There's eMusic, MSN Music, Napster To Go, Rhapsody, Wal-mart, Amazon, Yahoo! Music.

Mike, we know you've got deadlines man, or otherwise you don't get paid, but you really lost everyone with your creative writing exercise.

"...increasingly bash Apple" ??? Only by guys who write editorials that sometimes try to mask themselves as news. The iPod has been around for 5 years, other players were around before then. No one was forced to buy iPods, they are still very expensive. Consumers buy them anyway. They could buy something else listed above. Even owning an iPod, all the music can be bought elsewhere and loaded. In the past, people complained about loading songs easily. That's iTunes true victory.

And no, I'll never give Apple the credit for inventing the GUI. The facts are all there...just read them.

You are right, the FACTS are there, you just choose to ignore them as they FACTS don't fit with your OPINION.

Message was edited by: AuroraManson. Please refrain from personal attacks.

RIAA and DRM is the problem NOT Apple

I read your story and was hoping to hear an enlightened perspective of the dramatic shift that has occurred in the computer industry over the course of the last three years. What instead I read was a misleading and untrue article with little knowledge on why itunes does what you say it does.
If anything Apples policy reflects directly to the RIAA intentions and other content providers that you "the consumer" never truly own your music/content. This is not Apple's fault this is the system they have to deal with since they are only the distributor, not the maker of the music/content.
If anything they are putting themselves into a place where they have more power or influence, than you or I, to control pricing and availability of the content. So far I think they have done a great job.

dtherio...OK. Let me try to patiently explain this to you.

Here's an excerpt from Raskin's work which you kindly provided a link to in an earlier post. It is a crucial factor in my reasoning.

"So, at a time when hardware character generators were universal for computer displays (they could usually generate one ugly font, with underlining, brightness reversal, and blinking as the sole typographic options), I published a proposal that argued that computers would have to be built without them. A few years later, in the early 70's, the researchers at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) came to the same conclusion independently, and started building computers embodying this idea. The workers at PARC also believed as I did that human usability was more important than the traditional concerns of computer science at the time: execution speed and the efficient use of memory. When I visited PARC shortly after it was opened, I found, for the first time, a computer-oriented community that was sympathetic to my work. On their part they found an outsider who did not have to be convinced that what they were doing was important or headed in the right direction. If Stross or Levy had gone back and read the works I had written before PARC was founded, or even interviewed the people I had known at PARC, they would have learned that many of the Mac's key concepts had had an independent genesis."

Raskin states that PARC independently came up with the idea of a much more easy-to-use, graphical human interface and built a machine to take advantage of it. He gives credit for PARC coming up with the same ideas as his own and does not say that PARC copied his ideas.

Now, let's take care of Jef Raskin for the final time — I'm tired of discussing this guy. There was a member of the Mac development team, one of the original Mac creators, named Andy Hertzfeld. In fact, he has a book out titled, "Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made". He joined Apple in 1979 and worked alongside Bill Atkinson (considered the Mac's software genius) and Burrell Smith (the hardware guru), as well as Wozniak and Jobs. Here's what he has to say about Jef Raskin:

"Jef does claim he invented certain key concepts when no one else thinks he did. Jef actually was not around for almost the entire time the Mac was developed. He left the day before I started (in 1981). Jef's a tremendous individual and he deserves enormous credit for having the original vision for the Macintosh, starting the project and putting together a dynamite, small team. But then he got at odds with the team and left.
Jef had a lot of ideas about how the Macintosh should be, but they're not in the Macintosh.
Steve Jobs is who I would call the father of the Mac. In second place I'd put Burrell Smith and in third place I'd put Bill Atkinson."

Now...dtherio, if you're going to argue, please use relevant facts to back up your argument. Simply telling me that I need to teach the facts, that I should go back to school, and that you're sorry for my students, is ranting. I'm open to disagreement, and even (contrary to your personal belief) changing my opinion based upon a good, logical, clear, and objective presentation of the facts. So let's see them. If you're going to insult me, I'd love to see what you have to prove your point.

Apple may become a Microsoft, but the differences for now are that Microsoft is valued at about $167Billion more dollars according to yahoo finance, and while the ipod enjoys about a 70% dominance in market share, Microsoft enjoys about 95% for Windows. Apple is not Microsoft at this point in time.

Bundling products together and telling consumers to take it or leave it is not illegal . It only becomes illegal when a company which possess monopoly power in one market bundles unrelated products with its core product for the purpose of gaining market share in other markets. This is what microsoft did, and continues to do to the present day. You have not convinced me that Apple possess monopoly power. They just make good products.

#1 iTunes is definitely one of the most bloated multia media programs out there. The person who said, "it must be your computer".. what a joke. Its slow on nearly everyones computer....

#2 To the article writer... the problem with iTunes is there DRM is "different" than any other services. I can download a song with Yahoo Music, Napster, or any other non-apple service and play on any mp3 player. With ipods.. I cannot download on Napster, Yahoo, MTV etc... it won't work correctly. Apple forces you to play the songs on iTunes. Downloading a song then having to burn to a CD just to listen to it on another device... IMHO is to much work to do.

#3 Microsoft programs aren't necessairly the best but "crashes every 2 minutes".. ok that is a TAD exagerration. Most people with XP can "easily" run the OS for several weeks to months without rebooting. Not sure what kind of system you have that crashes every 2 minutes.. maybe get a new machine?

#4 My only biggest gripe with Apple is being forced to use iTunes. I am very surprised no one has tried to sue them over this issue. No other mp3 player requires you to only use their software and only their exclusive DRM technology. I can use any "regular" DRM with my Zen player. Heck, this is the #1 reason why I "gave away" my iPod and bought a Zen.

#5 Not necessairly regarding this story.. but... HTC smart phones easily beat iPhone to the punch. Wi-fi, internet, touch screen, java, flash... all work on HTCs. People think the iPhone was the first to do this.. not even. My HTC minus the mp3 player blows iPhone at of the water.. and is a hell of a lot cheaper!