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Famously, in the late 1980's Apple sued Microsoft over the "look and feel" of Windows 2.x. The claim was that Windows breached Apple's copyright by being too similar to the Mac UI. Apple ultimately lost, but as the Wikipedia page on the subject explains some of the contested elements were:

  • The existence of windows on the screen
  • Rectangular windows which could be resized, overlap and have title bars

The Amiga's Workbench and intuition.library provided all of these features, along with many other elements and concepts shared with the Mac UI. These were demonstrated in 1984 and released publicly in 1985, yet Windows 2.0 didn't appear until late 1987.

So why didn't Apple sue Commodore/Amiga for the same breach of "look and feel"? Was it because Commodore was simply beneath Apple's radar at the time, or was the Apple vs Microsoft more about politics than technology?

KenD
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    I tried to find the worth of Commodore in 1987 vs the worth of Microsoft but failed. It would perhaps be related. – pipe Mar 01 '20 at 15:14
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    Commodore mostly lost money between Tramiel’s exit and the launch of the A500. – Tommy Mar 01 '20 at 15:46
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    Is this the same Apple that stole theirs from Xerox PARC ? :) – Alan B Mar 02 '20 at 19:08
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    Apple also sued Digital Research over the GEM desktop. This affected the development of the Atari ST series. – Lars Brinkhoff Mar 03 '20 at 05:46
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    @AlanB, That's a myth. Apple made a stock deal with Xerox, which granted them access to Xerox's innovations. Not a good deal for Xerox in retrospective, given the revolutionary technology they were giving away, but it was all consensual. – GetFree Mar 03 '20 at 10:18
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    @GetFree: Well, Jobs famously said: "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." – ninjalj Mar 03 '20 at 14:25
  • Related (non dup) question from the History site: Did Bill Gates steal the GUI concept from Steve Jobs?. I see a lot of the answers and comments here covering a lot of the same ground. – T.E.D. Mar 03 '20 at 18:08
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    @Lars Brinkhoff Apple sue against Digital Research did not have any effect on Atari TOS. DR had to change GEM for PC, but GEM for Atari remain unaffected. I believe that Apple did not see Atari or Amiga as serious competition. – Milan Kovac Aug 11 '20 at 11:21
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    @T.E.D. Apple called Microsoft to make a spreadsheet for Macintosh so Microsoft had access to Mac documentation and internals. Find details at https://www.folklore.org – Milan Kovac Aug 11 '20 at 11:21
  • @MilanKovac - ...which information is in my answer to the question I linked in my comment above. (And that kind if thing was my entire reason for linking that question. Silly to be duping info here that is more on-topic and covered adequately elsewhere). – T.E.D. Aug 11 '20 at 13:02
  • @MilanKovac, as I recall Atari development of GEM slowed to a crawl for a period when Apple was on the war path. – Lars Brinkhoff Aug 12 '20 at 10:39
  • Atari was a GEM licensee. They probably protected themselves with a few legal clauses, which would require Digital Research to pay for their defense if Apple went after them. It's also likely Digital Research worked out a deal with Apple to hold Atari harmless. It's likely Apple have walked away from the settlement with the rights to Atari's license fees, they might have been the lunch handed over to the bully. – ATL_DEV Dec 02 '23 at 03:59

4 Answers4

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While some lawyers do occasionally file lawsuits based mainly on their targets having "deep pockets", like Microsoft had, this is not generally successful. In order for a typical corporate lawsuit to gain any traction in the court, the plaintiff must provide sufficient "standing".

In order to establish standing, Apple sought to convince the court that Microsoft's actions violated an earlier licensing agreement for Macintosh technology that was inked between Apple and Microsoft in 1985. Furthermore, HP was included in the lawsuit because it was alleged Microsoft had sub-licensed Windows technology to HP for NewWave.

The litigation arose out of a dispute whether an earlier version of Microsoft's software, Windows 1.0, infringed Apple copyrights. Microsoft and Apple sought to put that dispute to rest by an agreement on November 22, 1985 ("1985 Agreement"). By that agreement, Apple granted to Microsoft a non-exclusive license of the audiovisual displays in Windows 1.0. As the court found on March 20, 1989, however, the 1985 Agreement is not a complete defense to this action, because it was limited to the visual displays in Windows 1.0 and did not cover displays in Windows 2.03 that were not in the prior work. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 709 F. Supp. 925, 930 (N.D.Cal.1989).

Given that no such prior licensing agreements existed between Apple and Commodore-Amiga, it is apparent that the same complaint could not be brought against them by Apple. If Apple wanted to file subsequent lawsuits against Commodore, and others who used similar GUI elements to the Macintosh, they really needed a victory against Microsoft and HP first, which would set a precedent about copyright protections applying to the Mac GUI. After all, copyright was the underlying basis for these Apple claims, not stronger protections, such as registered U.S. patents.

Since Apple ultimately lost the copyright argument, there was never any point to reviving this case by going after other alleged "infringers", such as Commodore. The court had already ruled no infringement had taken place by Microsoft, so Commodore was inoculated against such a claim.

Brian H
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    Well put. In addition, using patents would have been easy undermined (at least back then) by showing prior art in form of Xerox Star and other GUI applications. – Raffzahn Mar 01 '20 at 17:56
  • The trash can icon was changed or removed from most of the GUI's, except for Digital Researches GEM GUI, which is mostly used on Atari ST family. – rcgldr Mar 01 '20 at 20:41
  • @rcgldr: the trash can was removed on the PC version of GEM. – ninjalj Mar 01 '20 at 23:31
  • @ninjalj - it was removed by DRI with a new version called GEM/2, in order to avoid a potential lawsuit. GEM/1 wasn't changed, and GEM/2 was only made for PC, so the Atari ST remained based on GEM/1 with some updates. I have an Atari ST, and I also have GEM/1 and GEM/2 installed on separate Windows Virtual PC images (using MSDOS 6.22 as the base OS). – rcgldr Mar 02 '20 at 11:52
  • The Amstrad PC1512 came with GEM (Desktop version 2.0, dated 24 march 1986). Most people probably remember GEM from either the ST or the 1512. – ninjalj Mar 02 '20 at 13:14
  • Also (copyright being a weak argument) why design patents for UI exploded after this. By the time Apple moved to the iPod, iPhone, and iOS they were armed to the teeth with UI design and UI utility patents and continue to fight them (most notoriously with Samsung) to this day. – J... Mar 02 '20 at 17:33
  • @Raffzahn But it was undermined in the suit against Microsoft. Concern that the lawsuit could be undermined by prior art couldn't have been the reason for going after Microsoft, but not Commodore. – Kaz Mar 02 '20 at 18:30
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It may have been a combination of hubris and legal prudence on Commodore's part; per Commodore: The Amiga Years:

The Amiga designers wanted something more original than [Berkeley Softworks'] proposal. "This may have been unfair, but part of it was we thought GEOS looked too much like a Mac; a color Mac before there was a color Mac," says [Dale] Luck. "It was felt that we could do something a lot better."

... The Amiga employees were careful not to put themselves at risk of a lawsuit over the GUI. "We started out passing around design docs. The actual implementation was done completely behind the walls so that there was no knowledge of what anyone else had done," says [RJ] Mical.

Because of this policy, Amiga did not not receive any infringement lawsuits based on their GUI. "Not a one; not from anyone, ever," says Mical. "I attribute that mostly to the fact that once I decided that I needed to do a user interface, I slammed the door and drew the blinds and invented it completely and entirely on my own. I didn't look at any other computer system through the whole period. We wanted it to be as clean-room as possible."

i.e.

  • there was a conscious decision not to look too much like a Mac, and instead to aim higher; and
  • once that decision was made, development occurred with as little in the way of external influences as they could manage.

As to the theory suggested elsewhere in a comment, I do not think it was that Commodore was not on Apple's radar — the Apple II was Apple's cash cow for longer than the C64 was Commodore's and they will have been aware of the competition. There's also some staff crossover; e.g. Ron Nicholson, a hardware designer, has his signature inside the cases of both the Macintosh 128k and the Amiga 1000†.

Commodore also once tried to hire Jean-Louis Gassée, who famously helped to oust Steve Jobs while at Apple and then later failed to sell his BeOS back to them; per Amazing Computing, November 1996 via Commodore: The Final Years:

Gassée both admired and feared Commodore Amiga during his tenure at Apple. "We were really scared of the Amiga," he says. "Fortunately, Irving Gould helped Apple by running Commodore into the ground."

† He's also a member here so perhaps he can provide more colour.

Tommy
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    I'm not familiar with the Amiga UI. Did it adopt the "office desktop metaphor" a la Xerox Star, or come up with an alternative idea for arranging programs and files? – dave Mar 01 '20 at 23:55
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    The metaphor is a workbench rather than a desktop, with drawers not folders, but the main difference from the then-Mac is that because it was preemptively multitasking it skips straight to the semi-modern world where applications just open windows within the existing desktop — compare to pre-MultiFinder Mac OS where the desktop is something you leave to enter an application. If MacWrite is running, the Finder isn't. The Amiga also famously allowed non-windowed applications in arbitrary graphics modes that you can slide up and down in front of each other thanks to the Copper. – Tommy Mar 02 '20 at 00:24
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    Also, in terms of coding, it differs much more obviously, with widgets being something you request creation of and which will message you, but which don't live in your thread. Keeping the system responsive isn't your responsibility, other than being careful about the lack of memory protection. Conversely, Win16 and the classic Mac Toolkit are virtually interchangeable. – Tommy Mar 02 '20 at 00:26
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    Another difference: I bought an Amiga instead of a Mac because of how many times the Mac crashed in my first “test drive” in the store. Now the Amiga wasn’t a jewel in that regard, either, but at_the_time it was more stable than Mac. – WGroleau Mar 02 '20 at 02:18
  • One thing of the Amiga UI that I hated was that you didn't have direct access to the files on the storage. On the Mac and also in GEM (and also windows starting with win95/NT4), when you inserted a disk or accessed the hard disk, you could access directly all the files inside the window. On the workbench (and Windows <=3.11), you would only see icons that were specifically setup and could only access files via a specific file manager. On a basic 512K Amiga 500 with 1 floppy it was extremely annoying as you had to play the disk jockey all the time just to see if there was a readme on a floppy – Patrick Schlüter Mar 02 '20 at 10:43
  • How could the Amiga GUI (released 1985) be "anti-inspired" by GEOS (released 1986)? – pipe Mar 02 '20 at 12:21
  • @PatrickSchlüter that changed with AmigaOS 2.0. But anyway, I don’t see your point of “as you had to play the disk jockey all the time”. Whether you boot the standard Workbench or a disk containing a 3rd party file manager, the amount of disk swapping did not change. 1) Boot 2) Swap 3) Work on the files – Holger Mar 02 '20 at 12:30
  • @Holger compared to the ST, working (WORKing) on Amiga with only 1 floppy required much more disk swapping. That's why I sold my Amiga at that time to be replace it with a Mega ST2. It was so much more comfortable for my IT studies, programming Pascal etc. Gaming and multimedia was hands down better on Amiga, but simply developing software was so much simpler on the ST. – Patrick Schlüter Mar 02 '20 at 12:46
  • @PatrickSchlüter that might be true, but is not caused by the Workbench’s way of displaying files. Especially when developing software, you rarely looked at the files using the Workbench. – Holger Mar 02 '20 at 12:49
  • @pipe per the same book: 'Dougherty had previously approached Commodore in 1982 with an offer to develop the disk operating system for the C64. Now he would propose a similar offer for the Amiga, even though GEOS was little more than a glimmer in his eye at that time. "We were in discussion to help them on the Amiga operating system," he says. "I think we could have made something way better than the Mac. ... "'. So Commodore was reacting to the GEOS proposal. – Tommy Mar 02 '20 at 14:49
  • @another-dave The workbench GUI was still a WIMP interface (like nearly every other graphical OS for 20+ years, a few really weird SGI experiments excepted), but for all the inevitable similarities to Mac/WinOS and etc., it had as many quirky departures. One in particular I remember (#why??): Icons were fixed-size and laid out in a grid, but they could draw in every pixel of their grid cell end-to-end. So you could fake oversized icons by slicing the image up and placing the pieces in adjacent cells, ImageMap-style. (...I want to say the illusion broke down if you clicked on it, maybe?) – FeRD Mar 03 '20 at 06:05
  • @PatrickSchlüter - Once the memory expansions came in, I believe what most developers would do was create a ramdisk and copy the compiler there. – T.E.D. Mar 03 '20 at 20:22
  • sounds like learning from the i..ndustry was the better approach in the long run.. – akostadinov Mar 03 '20 at 21:20
  • @T.E.D. 2nd diskdrive and RAM disk. Disk swapping got old, real quick without both. The A520 scsi controller (with 2 MB RAM expansion) became a must have item when the full Lattice C compiler suite came on 9 (or was it 10) floppies. You could run the main compiler programs on a 2-drive system and a RAM disk if you were masochistic enough, but that didn't float my boat. – Tonny Oct 16 '20 at 14:54
  • A suit against Commodore by Apple would have been baseless but not by Xerox. Xerox was the patent holder for the GUI. Apple only had patents on their additions to it, such as the trashcan. None of them, however, appeared on the Amiga. – ATL_DEV Dec 02 '23 at 03:43
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Bill Hart (Amiga investor and director) told the story of Steve Jobs visiting Amiga in 1983.

On the way out, Jobs said, “I don’t see anything here that would ever be a threat to the Macintosh.”

So this could be easy and straight answer to original question.

Link to Bill Hart talk (2015.): https://youtu.be/GszY6dgSGTg

Milan Kovac
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In order to lead a proper lawsuit against "stealing" software concepts, you need to have proof that the defendant actually had access to your code base - That was easy for Apple in the case of MS - As MS was developing Apple software in the very early stage of development of the Macintosh and thus had access to Apple internal code, there was actually at least a theoretical possibility that software concepts were being transferred from MacOS into Windows.

That never happened with the Amiga.

tofro
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