Quote Originally Posted by green91
I know youre jab wasn't towards me but this line does amuse me. Microsoft quite honestly hasn't come up with many original ideas. Their ms-dos system was based on text based *nix and mainframe systems of its time. Their GUI was largely copied from macintosh who bought their interface from xerox and they also copied large amounts from the x windows system. Even today they steal styling ques from os x's gui and publicly available themes for gnome and kde and other xfree86 wm's. Guess where their multi-user server ideas were derived from? Unix. File permissions, indexing systems etc were mostly unix derived.

The only credit im willing to give microsoft is making desktops mainstream. They did a remarkable job of working with vendors to get shipped on OEM pcs as well as piecing parts of alot of people's work together to make a useable o/s.
Oh I totally agree with you, definitely not going to take away credit from Apple, Xerox, etc. Never the less they still did a wonderful job, and essentially transformed the world.