Who thought of it first? Who cares?

Microsoft and Apple are arguing about who came up first with the idea of having a pervasive search capability built into the OS Apple is shipping it imminently in Tiger, and Microsoft, eventually , in Longhorn. Well let's see: Windows had a broken Find command in the start menu forever. Apple has had find in the finder forever. Microsoft was talking about this kind of pervasive Find capability since Cairo.

"As described by Nash, the Cairo directory will maintain separate stores for files and the directory, but the file system will be extensible so users can add attributes, such as who created it, to a file identifier. The directory will be able to search for objects using those attributes, according to Nash." (from a Network World article of 4/8/96 - 9 Years ago!)****

I say, who cares? It is mind boggling that it's taken them this long to actually make it into the OS. Both Apple and Microsoft are way late. I also say, the only thing that matters is shipping the functionality to customers, and looking at it that way, clearly Apple gets props over Microsoft.