Taken from the very article you linked:
Quote:
Microsoft's main systems programmer assigned to the Mac project was Neil Konzen, a brilliant young Apple II hacker who grew up in their backyard in the suburbs of Seattle. Neil started working at Microsoft while he was still a high school student, and single-handedly implemented the system software for their hit Z80 card that allowed the Apple II to run CP/M software.
Neil loved Apple, so it was natural for Microsoft to assign him to their new, top-secret Macintosh project. He was responsible for integrating Microsoft's byte-code based interpreted environment (which actually was a copy of a system used at Xerox that favored memory efficiency over execution speed, which was appropriate for the Mac's limited memory) with the rapidly evolving Macintosh OS, so he quickly became Microsoft's expert in the technical details of the Mac system.
I gradually began to notice that Neil would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn't really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.
Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.
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Admittedly, I haven't read as much as other people on this... but I have read quite a bit. Everything I've read has left me with the impression that MS reverse-engineered the Apple OS in order to build Windows.
Keep in mind, when I say "reverse-engineering" I'm not necessarily referring to code level, I'm just talking about the internals of the OS, like was mentioned in the article.
Edit: Again, this is my interpretation of the things I have read. If I'm wrong, or if there's a fact-checked document somewhere that says that MS did not copy Windows from Apple, please let me know. It's all a pretty confusing story, so there's certainly room for error on my part.