Apple is flailing around and Microsoft is poised for world domination, mostly on the strength of an idea that wasn't Gates' in the first place. It was ruled that porting a metaphor to another platform was not criminal. Apple lost, and Microsoft got to keep its GUI. This is mostly because, in the United States, the 'look and feel' is defined as the 'structure, sequence, and organization' of a program. Apple sued, but a less-than-technically inclined court ruled that it is legal to copy the 'look and feel' of something if the internal mechanisms are different. Windows copied the conceptual framework of the Macintosh GUI, right down to the trash can (which Microsoft calls a 'recycle bin'), and marketed it as a platform for DOS-based computers. Gates, who as near as I can tell has never had an original idea in his career, is nevertheless extremely good at copying the great ideas of others. It wasn't long before Microsoft, headed up by one Bill Gates, entered the GUI game. One of the biggest software developers for the Macintosh was a company called Microsoft. There was a shortage of software, but companies were eager to develop for the Mac, seeing its potential for widespread infiltration into the non-techie market.

Programs like MacPaint, which contained the seminal elements of Photoshop, the king of modern graphics editing programs, turned an entire generation of artists on to the possibilities of digital art. Relatively inexpensive and fantastically easy to use, the 'Mac' was a smashing success, despite the limited computing power and memory housed in the chassis. This immortal television advertisement depicted users of IBM's PC as Orwellian drones trapped in the maw of a monochromatic, brutally mechanical, command-line interface, and dramatized their symbolic liberation by a woman bearing a new tool for home computations. Released in 1984 and billed as 'insanely great,' the Macintosh caught the public eye with one of the most famous commercials ever.

What are the two mac os gui interfaces