History of Macintosh
The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin began looking for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of the Apple Lisa team, introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year.In January 1981, Steve Jobs completely took over the Macintosh project. Jobs and a number of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC in December 1979, three months after the Lisa and Macintosh projects had begun. After hearing about the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC from former Xerox employees like Raskin, Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options.[2] The final Lisa and Macintosh operating systems used concepts from the Xerox Alto, but many elements of the graphical user interface were created by Apple including the menubar, pop-up menus and the concepts of drag and drop and direct manipulation. The first version of the Mac OS (simply called System) is easily distinguished between other operating systems from the same period because it does not use a command line interface; it was one of the first operating systems to use an entirely graphical user interface or GUI. Additional to the system kernel is the Finder, an application used for file management, which also displays the Desktop. The two files were contained in a folder directory labeled System Folder, which contained other resource files, like a printer driver, needed to interact with the System. Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its GUI to Microsoft for use in Windows 1.0, but when Microsoft made changes in Windows 2.0 adding overlapping windows and other features found in the Macintosh GUI, Apple filed suit. Apple added additional claims to the suit when Microsoft released Windows 3.0.Apple claimed the "look and feel" of the Macintosh operating system, taken as a whole, was protected by copyright, and that each individual element of the interface (such as the existence of windows on the screen, the rectangular appearance of windows, windows could be resized, overlap, and have title bars) was not as important as all these elements taken together. After oral arguments, the court insisted on an analysis of specific GUI elements that Apple claimed were infringements. Apple listed 189 GUI elements; the court decided that 179 of these elements had been licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 agreement and most of the remaining 10 elements were not copyrightable either they were unoriginal to Apple, or they were the only possible way of expressing a particular idea.Midway through the suit, Xerox filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming Apple had infringed copyrights Xerox held on its GUIs. Xerox had invited the Macintosh design team to view their GUI computers at the PARC research lab; these visits had been very influential on the development of the Macintosh GUI. Xerox's lawsuit appeared to be a defensive move to ensure that if Apple v. Microsoft established that "look and feel" was copyrightable, then Xerox would be the primary beneficiary, rather than Apple. The Xerox case was dismissed, for a variety of legal reasons