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EXACTLY.
Does anyone here remember GEOS? Woof! It was a kind of mockup of the early Mac GUI running on 8-bit processors. You could "run" it on a C-64, I put run in quotes because it was more of a slow crawl.
Anybody here remember the build quality of Tandy or Casio devices? Woof again. Tandy's DOS based computers were so bad they were practically a fork in the OS. Software which ran on them would list them as a separate compatible device, even though it was technically running the same OS.
The Zoomer was not prior art.

I had a Zoomer. I had a Messagepad. They were both very interesting little distractions that facinated me. Neither of them worked well - they were both horrible in their own unique ways.

Just saying, people have selective memories. Everyone's products were horrible by todays standards in the early 90s - even Apples.

Not that it means anything... But my Messagepad stopped working at about 6 months old (1994?). The Zoomer was still working in 2001 or so when I threw it away...

Edited 2012-08-27 19:54 UTC

Just because you dislike the OS it ran and considered the hardware makers second rate does not mean it was not prior art. It is as simple as that.

Did you actually ever use a Newton 100? Seriously, do you want to convince me it was not slow, buggy, and prone to hardware failures. Do you not remember how difficult it was to sync to your Mac? Do you not remember that it drained AAA batteries faster than a frat boy downing a keg? Do you not remember how horrid CalliGrapher's handwriting recognition software was? It was even mocked on the Simpsons.

But, unlike you, I recognize that it was the first model, and I expected that. Only in this pop culture age where all things must be instantly 'perfected' and a 'blockbuster' do we tend to forget that all 1.x products form hardware to software tend to suck until the bugs are fixed or the products are canceled & hopefully revived years later in another form.

This is the very psychological tendency of historical revisionism that is being addressed in this side-topic. I 'dislike' this so it must not have been so. I 'like' that so it most assuredly must have been so. When you can look back at over 35 years of tech history, the picture is a lot more nuanced and wider than seen only through a partisan haze.

From today's technology blog on the Guardian, commenting on Thom attempt to rewrite history sans Apple.

The Patent is here
http://www.google.com/patents?id=jQ8dAAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&d...

The drawings attached to the patent, which are worth a look, are here

http://www.google.com/patents/US5446882?printsec=drawing&dq=5,446,8...

Here is an idea: lets drop this tedious tech archaeology, the tech intellectual equivalent to trying to prove that Atlantis existed, and accept that stopping Android OEMs from copying Apple in the future (whether they did it in the past or not) will not stop them innovating and inventing. If they are up to it.

No actually you aren't fine with what is being said otherwise you wouldn't bring up tired straw man arguments constantly.

Apple and its current fans have a mistaken mindset currently that says because our products are a commercial success, we did this first, best, or alone. We are the great innovators and Jobs, who was a narcisstic ass-hole was somehow a creative genius instead of the prick he really was. Therefore we deserve to receive legal protection and can control the market as we see fit. We can destroy Android simply because Jobs lost to Microsoft and by gods, he wasn't going to lose again even after he was dead.

When others push back against that and say things like, well, there is prior art. Apple may have innovated that but they built it on the foundations done by this company or that company, you call us 'fandroids' or 'haters'. You pull out straw men and tell us that we don't see anything that Apple has done well.

Bullshit! I don't know how old you are but I am willing to bet that I was using Apple products before you were even born. Some of us remember history. We know about Xerox PARC. We know and used Zoomers and Amigas. We know about GRiDPads. We had Newtons and used superior Palms. We remember SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and rebranded it as iTunes.

We remember the Apple Quicktake, which was called the first consumer digital camera, but we know that it was simply a rebranded Fuji or Samsung. Yeah, we remember that and know that iPhones and iPads contain more prior art from other companies like this so we do pause. We remember when Apple almost went out of business and now they are the highest grossing corporation ever. And we know that what goes up, will eventually come down.

So please give this line of reasoning a rest. It is quite tiresome and wholly unconvincing to those of us who were there from the beginning and those who may be young but at least take the time to educate themselves on what really has happened in the history of modern computing.

Well, I'm a greybeard who has been around since the end of the 1940s, and I gotta tell you that Apple's recovery from where they were in 1997 to their current position goes way beyond whether they innovated anything. Arguably, there has not been another tech company that created an ecosystem and a strategy to leverage that ecosystem via a combination of hardware and software that found favor among tens of millions of 'great unwashed' as Apple has done.

They don't sell their 'shiny' toys just to tech illiteratis....there are plenty of power users sprinkled in their customer mix. The truth is almost always more nuanced than one might think.

So I imagine that it will be really shocking to you learning now that OS X (also a basis for iOS) is likewise an acquired OS - as is Pixo OS, the one used in iPods (and BTW, let's not forget the string of failures in developing a replacement for the last "really Apple" OS, the Mac OS Classic).
NVM how Apple doesn't actually manufacture anything for quite some time...

Also, contemporary product. And you must be really one heck of an Applebot, if you think that marketing or distribution changes anything WRT the significance of a product as a demonstration of tech trends and landscape...

BTW movements of talent and technology: Apple would be utterly lost, unable to compete, without largely taking what the industry at large comes up with - in the words of the messiah (NVM "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag...

(ohh, but I forgot, Apple is "special" and requires different ways of looking at what they do...)