Day in Tech History

Day in Tech History


March 17, 1988: Apple Sues Microsoft, HP over GUI

March 17, 2017

1988 – The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is what we use daily to open up email, our web browser and even those apps on your smartphone or tablet. With the first real GUI came the first copyright infringement for it as Apple sued both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for stealing features from Macintosh’s interface. Hewlett Packard was also named for their New Wave desktop environment. Missing from the suit is Microsoft Presentation Manager, which became the interface for IBM’s OS/2. The lawsuit got muddied when Xerox sued Apple for the same thing. That instance got thrown out rather quick. But the original...