Great read, thanks for the clairfication on the Mac vs. Windows issue. On the principal of being orriginal tho, it even states in the article that, while he did'nt rip xerox off, he did pretty much, with their concent, copy Xerox's idea. so in theory, Mac did the same as windows, just in a different way.
Either way, i agree, it does'nt matter how they got to the top, what matters is that their there. Alot of people blam MS for copying ideas, but when you start to look at some of their apps and what not, you can see how they improved on whatever it was they copied....in some instances
the new .Net stuff is a good example, it's basically compariable to Java, but when you start digging through the .net architecture, it's much cleaner and easier to write than java.
sorry bout the soap box :P heh.