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The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation" |
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A CATALOG OF INVENTION |
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great many people take it on faith that a high technology company as wildly successful as Microsoft must have invented something of consequence. After all, this industry is built on invention, isn't it? Certainly, Microsoft holds scores of patents and copyrights -- but we'd like to know which products or basic technologies we use can be credited to the big brains in Redmond. This is a prime opportunity for Microsoft defenders to provide some evidence for the company's original contributions to the industry, because frankly, we're at a loss to think of a single one. Nominate your entries to the Hall of Innovation. The date of the most recently added information for each entry follow in brackets.
Accepted NominationsUPDATE Microsoft BOB. This attempt to produce a "social interface" for the PC met with an unfavorable reception in the marketplace. Users chose an "interactive" cartoon character assistant, and cartoons represented household items such as checkbook, telephone, books, etc. Despite its failure as a commercial product, the key elements of BOB (cartoons, imaginary characters designed to act as helpful guides, and animations) have been inserted into Microsoft Office97 as "user help." Ah, but does this long-standing (if dubious) innovation still pass muster? Several readers recently cast doubt. According to one, Packard Bell Navigator was a "social interface" included as the default shell with their computers running Windows 3.1 and early versions of Windows 95. Another reader suggests two games as the source of cartoon user feedback: Electronic Arts "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" from the early 1990s and Chris Crawford's "Patton vs. Rommel" (1986-7), both of which provided cartoon feedback. This nomination once looked solid, but is now teetering on the edge of rejection. [9 Jan 99] The Talking Paper Clip. The cartoon assistant in Office97. See also "Microsoft BOB." [19 Jul 98] Rejected NominationsUPDATE The Tabbed Window View. A common feature within Windows is dialog boxes with tabs on the top. Clicking on one of the tabs changes the contents of the dialog box. It's probably been around since Windows 3.11, but is it a Microsoft innovation? According to several readers, this feature was found first in OS/2 in 1992 and before the introduction of Windows 3.11. Rejected! [9 Jan 99] ClearType. Nominated and rejected in one easy stroke is Microsoft's much vaunted ClearType technology, a method of increasing the apparent resolution, and thus the readability, of flat panel (LCD) displays using a sub-pixel rendering process. While this is certainly a good idea, it is hardly a new one. Sub-pixel rendering was actually first implemented in 1976 by Steve Wozniak at Apple Computer for the Apple ][ graphics system. It's worth noting that with the ClearType announcement Microsoft also attempted to abscond with the credit for TrueType, (referring to ClearType as an extension of "our TrueType technology"), when in fact TrueType was invented by Apple Computer in 1989 and not even adopted by Microsoft until 1992. So this time, Microsoft manages to be caught with both of its hands planted firmly in cookie jar. [7 Dec 98] VFAT Filing System. The placement of the VFAT file allocation system (Windows 95) on top of the old FAT16 (MS-DOS and Windows 3.x) introduced long file names to PC users -- eliminating the FAT 8.3 maximum. This nominated innovation allowed Microsoft to introduce friendlier, long filenames without "breaking" old MS-DOS programs reliant on FAT. This was accomplished with a system extension known as VFAT, which works by keeping a older style set of filenames simultaneously with an additional set of long filenames. Filenames longer than the 8.3 format aren't new, but VFAT enabled Microsoft to 'facelift' an out-of-date filing system while sparing users the disruption of updating. So is VFAT an innovation? Apparently not -- GEOS from Geoworks provided a way to use long filenames on a FAT partition before Microsoft did it with VFAT, and OS/2 version 2.0 broke out of the 8.3 limitation. And of course, Unix and MacOS had long names even before GEOS. [10 Dec 98] Hypertext Help. Hypertext technology was first by conceptualized by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, further visioned by Ted Nelson in the 1970s, and commercially pioneered by Apple in the 1980s (though one reader claims Xerox was its actual inventor). In any case, the Microsoft innovation claim clearly must be limited to the use of hypertext in its help system. But according to readers, hypertext help was available on the NOS/VE operating system for CDC Cyber 180 computers in 1984, and SunSoft, had hypertext a help system in its AnswerBook suite in the early 90s. Also, the original Emacs for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) at the MIT AI Lab, had it during the early 1970s in its Info documentation reader and the Symbolics Lisp Machine, and its predecessor, the MIT AI Lab CADR developed in the late 70s or early 80s. Both had hypertext help systems that were mouse-driven and supported layout, fonts and context-sensitive help. Nomination rejected on the basis of overwhelming contrary evidence. [10 Dec 98] Word for DOS. Was this the first word processor to support style sheets, a mouse, pseudo-WYSIWYG and the ability to work in fonts by points? Not at all, according to our readers. Products such as Apple's LisaWrite (1980) used "Stationery" pads providing WYSWIG text and font faces, styles, sizes and different page sizes. Predating even the Lisa with respect to font faces, styles and point sizes was the Wang word processor, and later, the Xerox Star (1981) -- all of which clearly predate Microsoft's earliest word processor efforts, circa 1982. Nomination resoundingly rejected. [22 Nov 98] CD-ROM Autorun. This nominated Windows 95 feature enables the system to automatically run CD-ROM software immediately upon insertion of the disc into the computer. Not an innovation, says our readers: the Commodore Amiga introduced this feature in 1991 with the release of the CDTV and the A570 CD-ROM drive for the Amiga A500. Also, the Macintosh has long supported auto-running CDs, though the Mac autorun feature was originally (but is no longer) limited to the automatic playing of audio CDs. Readers have also noted that both the Amiga and the Macintosh are bootable from a CD, a feature Windows still does not support [6 September 98]. Auto/hiding taskbar. Was Windows the first graphical shell to use a display of currently open applications which appeared and disappeared on mouse movement into/out of a particular area on the side of the screen? Not according to our correspondents: This feature or very similar features were previously available in Sun, OS/2, Macintosh and Amiga systems. [15 Aug 98] Excel/Multiplan. Multiplan for the Macintosh (the direct ancestor to Excel), released in 1984, may have been the first commercially successful WYSIWYG spreadsheet, but the first WYSIWYG spreadsheet itself was apparently Apple's LisaCalc (c. 1980). Further, the spreadsheet itself was invented with VisiCalc for the Apple ][ several years earlier and WYSIWYG originated at Xerox during the mid-1970s, so its application in Multiplan and Excel are marginal innovations at best. [22 Nov 98] QBASIC engine. An interpreter that translates BASIC into a FORTH-like language and then compiling the FORTH, while retaining sufficient information to back-translate into BASIC in real time, invisibly to the user. According to our readers, UCSD P-Code and Digital Research CP/M BASIC and the Business BASIC (BB) implementation on MAI Basic Four minicomputers were performing similar tricks many years earlier. Even desktop a BASIC calculator from Hewlett Packard called the 9830A did precisely the same thing in 1972. Nomination rejected in the face of no sustaining evidence of a Microsoft innovation. [22 Nov 98] Pending Nominations
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last revised: 9 January 1999 |