In the land of high-tech ventures, by the waters of Frisco Bay --
Hewlett Packard up by Stanford, IBM in San Jose - [1]
The hackers of the Apple wrote their code and schemed their schemes
In the Valley known as Silicon, where fortunes grow from dreams.
And they build some fine computers, if you skip the Apple III, [2]
But they vowed to build a new machine that would the market please.
They would ease the User's burden; the command line they'd replace
With the magic known as GUI: Graphic User Interface.
Chorus:
Windows Scrolling in the Valley
Lead the Hackers off on a GUI tide.
There's blood on the chips down at HP, DEC, and MIPS [3]
But the Heart of the Apple Lisa never died.
Then from Xerox came the Alto, never marketed nor sold, [4]
Bringing mice and multitasking, and menus that unfold.
Desktops sprouted metal rodents; bitmaps glowed upon the screen,
And printers put on whizzy wigs to print just what was seen. [5]
Nearly lost in Big Blue's shadow, incompatible with DOS,
The Lisa, slow and costly, seemed sure to be a loss,
But then came Macs and Fat Macs, Laserwriters, II's and more,
And word would come from Microsoft, "You realize, This Means War!"
CHORUS
The Chief said to the Hackers, in his anger and his pain,
"I am no more John Sculley. Scrolling Windows is my name.
They condemn us to niche markets, call our products vaporware!
We will sue them if we must, but we'll retain our market share!"
Well, they climbed on board that Scuzzy bus, with Postscript in their hearts. [6]
They won in desktop publishing. They won in graphic arts.
'Til Bill Gates, he saw his strategy, and sent the email down,
To copy those GUI features, wherever they be found.
CHORUS
Three Windows versions later, past the Pentium divide, [7,8]
The strangest of bedfellows, IBM, now on their side, [9]
Three thousand applications on the Power PC run,
But the buyers and the users still are leaving, one by one.
Windows Scrolling In the Valley said "My heart is sick and sad.
The future now is RISCy, the old chips are dead. [10]
The lawyers take our spirit, but I've stock options galore. [11]
From where Scott McNealy stands, I will fight no more!
CHORUS
They were moved to Intel platforms. Michelangelo ran rife. [12]
But more hackers quit from boredom, and went off to get a life.
And the man once known as Scully, with great glee is heard to state,
"They'll get Windows '95 debugged in 1998" [13]
But sometimes, without warning, in some dull commercial app
A hack of wondrous cleverness emerges from the crap.
A metaphor that's graceful, a real need that it can fill
double-click upon that icon; the Apple Lisa's living still!
CHORUS