Apple has launched a significant lawsuit against Microsoft 36 years ago on March 18, 1988 — the outcome of which defined how technology companies could use the ideas of others while developing then-revolutionary computer software.
In his The $5.5 billion suitApple claimed that Microsoft copied the look and feel of their computers with Windows version 2.03. At the time, Apple computers were the first to feature graphical user interfaces (or GUIs) — a new and exciting way for users to interact with computer screens using visual elements such as icons, buttons, and menus instead of text. Apple released its first commercial computer with GUI named “Lisa” 1983. Here’s how the New York Times described the GUI five years later:
“…almost all PC manufacturers are moving towards the Macintosh look. That look is based on what the industry calls a graphical user interface, in which information appears in windows and operations are performed by pointing at objects and menus using a hand-held device called a mouse—the main selling point of the Macintosh.”
Before the lawsuit, the rising tech giants were friendly. In 1985, they came to an agreement. Apple licensed its design elements for Windows version 1 to Microsoft, and Apple got the rights to it use some Microsoft products. But everything went down the drain when Microsoft released the next version of Windows, which contained even more elements of Apple’s GUI.
Ironically, said Xerox Corporation Apple actually copied his GUI used in his computer called Star. It’s Xerox widely credited with the development of the first graphical user interface in the 1970s. But Xerox’s lawsuit was dismissed in 1990.
“I think it’s unfortunate,” copyright lawyer G. Gervaise Davis told the New York Times of the dismissal at the time, “because Apple is running around going after Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for things they borrowed from Xerox.”
Apple’s lawsuit was also dismissed, and the Supreme Court rejected Apple’s final appeal 1995, upholding a previous ruling that Microsoft’s use of its design elements was covered by their 1985 agreement or otherwise not copyrightable. While it was a major blow to Apple, which had only fallen further behind Microsoft in the 1990s, the ruling opened the way for other PC companies to build on each other’s ideas.