Thursday, June 25, 1998

With Windows 98, Microsoft finally catches up with Mac

By JAMES COATES / Chicago Tribune

With Windows 98 on the verge of reaching store shelves, it becomes ever more clear that Bill Gates is building a whole lot more than just the ultimate Wintel (Microsoft running on Intel chips) computer.

Gates is building the ultimate Macintosh.

That's right, friends and neighbors, Windows 98 brings us nothing less than the ultimate Mac -- the True Mac.

In many ways, a Pentium running Windows 98 becomes the Mac as it was supposed to be ever since it was revealed to a small knot of Cupertino, Calif., computer geniuses in much the same fashion as the light that struck St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

With Windows 98 Gates is closing in on a dream revealed to Apple Computer Inc.'s founder Steve Jobs during the now fabled Epiphany of Palo Alto back in December of 1979.

The dream has been clear as sheet lightning from the git-go. But it has taken 19 years to come true because until now Microsoft held back, operating always just a shade shy of blatantly appropriating the whole ball of golden delicious wax known as Macintosh.

As Steven Levy tells the story in his strange biography of the Macintosh, "Insanely Great," the revelation that created the personal computer as we know it today came when Jobs and a half-dozen cronies made a visit to the Palo Alto Research Center that storied December almost two decades ago.

Built around a band of Strangelovian Pentagon bomb scientists, Xerox Corp.-sponsored PARC held the crown jewels of what was then the world's most innovative company. In the Cold War tradition of Lockheed's notorious Skunk Works, PARC's weapons-scientists-turned-computer-geeks created in 1979 a revolution nobody had even dreamed yet.

The PARC device displayed its stuff by drawing pictures instead of typing input and output in the text that had been the universal method ever since Thomas Watson stuck the first video terminal on one of his IBM cash registers.

Using a heretofore unknown trick called bit-mapped graphics, the PARC machine was the first to use icons instead of words to point to files.

A "brick" with a slender wire attached to the computer let a user choose these icons to do things like draw on the screen by changing the color of pixels as the cursor moved over them.

Because of that one visit Jobs was well ahead of Gates, bringing forth Macintosh in 1984.

When Microsoft finally produced the bit-mapped, mouse-based point-and-click system called Windows 3.1 in 1992, it was laughably inferior to Mac.

But it was close enough to prompt a long simmering court war in which Apple accused Microsoft of stealing the "look and feel" of Mac.

About the time this lawsuit petered out, Microsoft brought us Windows 95, which did, indeed, capture much of the Mac look and feel with files given unique icons and with directories now displayed as folders exactly as they were in Mac.

A Windows 95 Start button was a bold-faced copy of the Apple Menu in Mac that lets a user quickly find all needed programs with a single mouse click.

Mac fanatics fumed that Windows 95 was far inferior to their beloved machine, but it certainly was close enough to utterly destroy Macintosh as a competitor.

With Apple now scrambling for crumbs in a marketplace where Windows controls 90 percent-plus of all sales, Windows 98 closes the circle and brings to Wintel the rest of the stuff that Microsoft had been reluctant to appropriate from Mac earlier.

For example, the Wintel crowd had refrained from swiping the Mac wiring scheme that uses the same plug for the keyboard, mouse and a few other peripherals and lets users hook a mouse into the keyboard, the keyboard into the monitor and the monitor into the CPU. Windows 98 does exactly this using the new USB (Universal Serial Bus) connections.

For the first time Windows 98 has a built-in video player to match the long-standing Apple Video Player. Also for the first time, Windows 98 lets you plug several different monitors into the same computer and display different programs in each -- a Mac feature used heavily by artists, designers and engineers.

Recently Gates carried on at length about perhaps the biggest copy job of all, making Windows 98 itself handle most of the input and output tasks that software companies now must write over and over for each program.

Because Mac's operating system did exactly that in the past, Macintosh software almost always is far less bloated than the notorious Windows fatware. But, Gates boasted, with Windows 98 these tasks, called "calls" by programmers, will be in the operating system itself just as they are in Mac.

And what does Gates call copying the Apple Menu with the Start button, the Mac folders with Windows folders, the mouse/keyboard wiring, the video display and all these other features revealed to St. Steve on the road to Palo Alto?

He calls it innovation.

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(Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicago.tribune.com/go/askjim or e-mail jcoates@ameritech.net Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611.)

(c) 1998, Chicago Tribune.

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