San Francisco Canyon Company was a

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

company that was contracted by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

in 1992 to port the

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

technology to

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. They made their first release of ''QuickTime for Windows'' in November 1992. In July 1993,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

contracted the San Francisco Canyon Company to improve the performance of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video-playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

technology on Intel processors. By the end of 1993, Intel and Microsoft had combined their efforts to improve Video for Windows by creating a joint technology called Display Control Interface that was included in version 1.1d of Video for Windows (released in late 1994). As with WinG, the main problem this technology fixed was that Windows 3.x video drivers implemented all

GDI GDI may refer to: Science and technology * Gasoline direct injection, a type of fuel injection * Graphics Device Interface, a component of Microsoft Windows * Guanosine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor, a protein Organisations * Gabriel Dumont I ...

routines including for drawing

bitmap In computing, a bitmap (also called raster) graphic is an image formed from rows of different colored pixels. A GIF is an example of a graphics image file that uses a bitmap. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a partic ...

s in the video drivers themselves, and performance of these routines varied across drivers. The lawsuit "''Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co.''", filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows. On March 3, 1995, a

Federal judge Federal judges are judges appointed by a federal level of government as opposed to the state/provincial/local level. United States A U.S. federal judge is appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in accordance with Arti ...

issued a temporary

restraining order A restraining order or protective order is an order used by a court to protect a person in a situation often involving alleged domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, assault, harassment, stalking, or sexual assault. Restraining and perso ...

that prohibited Microsoft from distributing its current version of Video for Windows. Microsoft subsequently released version 1.1e of Video for Windows, which removed all of the code contributed by the San Francisco Canyon Company, stating in the release notes "does not include the low-level driver code that was licensed from Intel Corporation". Later testimony in the ''

United States v. Microsoft Corp. ''United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation'', 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of ...

'' case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

was threatening the cancellation of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

for Mac. In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

" lawsuit, and agree to make

Internet Explorer for Mac Internet Explorer for Mac (also referred to as Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, Internet Explorer:mac or IE:mac) is a discontinued proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform to b ...

the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office,

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another."Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement"
FindLaw, August 5, 1997

References

External links

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' article by John Markoff on February 10, 1995.

TidBITS on February 13, 1995.

- letter from Apple Director Michael Mace regarding the issue (February 9, 1995)

- follow-up letter from Apple Director Michael Mace regarding the issue (original sources for some of Rick Segal's postings be found o
Google Groups
includin
Rick Segal's responses to this open letter as well

at ''MacKiDo'', May 6, 1997.

at ''RoughlyDrafted'', February 2, 2004.
"Notes on similarities between QTVHDW.DLL (Apple QuickTime for Windows) and DCISVGA.DRV (Microsoft/Intel Video for Windows)"
by Andrew Schulman, February 22, 1995 (analysis of identical code). Defunct software companies of the United States

References

Further reading

External links