Xerox Alto Computer 30th Anniversary 194
aheath writes "The New York Times has a story about the 30th anniversary of the Xerox Alto computer: How Digital Pioneers Put the 'Personal' in PC's. According to the PARC Factsheet "The Alto Computer (1973/1980)
included the Graphical User Interface (GUI), WYSIWYG editing, bit-mapped display, overlapping windows, and the first commercial use of the mouse." The concepts prototyped in the Xerox Alto contributed to the development of the Xerox Star, the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows 1.0."
Re:*cork pop*-fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is. (Score:1, Informative)
Dealers of Lightening (Score:5, Informative)
The section I found most interesting was the political battles over purchasing a research computer. After selecting a computer that was best suited for the job, they didn't get to buy it, and ended up building their own. A great story about how the pure research and deep thinkers mixed both worked together and battled against the engineers and the suits.
Non-registration URL. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:*cork pop* (Score:3, Informative)
or one they refined to usefulness anyhows. If I weren't so lazy I'd go look it up somewhere
A little better picture. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Can be found here [digibarn.com] -- odd little note, the original CPU is on casters, so I suppose it ranks as the first portable too.
Its blazing computational stats:
BCPL: 5-10 uSec for a simple expression
Nova Asm: 1-2uSec / instruction
Microcode: 170 nSec / micro instruction
Can be found with a lot of other cool information on its original programming language and some software on this very cool page [spies.com] by an Alto collector.
Neat machine. I think I want one now.
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Great milestone! (Score:2, Informative)
Some screenshots [zimmers.net]
And, let's not forget a TRUE genius and pioneer, Doug Englebart [ibiblio.org]. He predated the Alto. This guy is what engineering and technology is all about. Not the bunch of clueless kids (and women!) that are sucked into the indoctrination of universities these days....
Ah, my kingdom for a time machine to travel back to the 1960s. Men were men, electrical engineers actually liked electronics way before they went to school and there was no fooling around!
Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing (Score:4, Informative)
Actually I remember using Geos on my c64 around 85/86, and unlike Windows 1.0, there were a few decent productivity apps for it. M$ isn't the only company guilty of stealing ideas, it's just they're the only ones to consistently make bad implementations of what they stole .
Did you know the Lisa could also run UNIX?
Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing (Score:2, Informative)
Steve Wozniac wrote: Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.
Re:And for some reason...... (Score:3, Informative)
It has improved greatly. I only use
I looked at ultra edit on my windows2k box. Even though it looked cool and had things like the ftp client built inside I still found it lacking compared to gVIm. Autoindentation is not as advanced and will only autoindent if the editor sees brackets. Also its not a scriptable as gVIm either.
I like the default color themes for gvim for c++ code but find it ugly when writing perl and java code. I have a different them automatically come up depending upon what kind of file I open. Try that with Visual C++ or UltraEdit.
They did NOT have overlapping windows! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing (Score:2, Informative)
Windows 1.0 in CGA mode was 600x200 black and white, if you had colors at all it was running in 16-color EGA mode. It also came with Paint, and a very early version of Win 3.1's File Manager, which was the main way to launch apps. And let's not forget Reversi
The Lisa was black and white, not grayscale. And yes, The Lisa 7/7 OS had a brilliant UI, and was a much more robust OS than MacOS would be for years to come. The UNIX variant it ran was Xenix (not sure if Microsoft had any involvement with it at the time.)
Re:And for some reason...... (Score:3, Informative)
It's just nuts to use anything else. Bring up many editors in a remote shell and you just go to a blankscreen (the editor used direct screen writes, etc.) and the whole shooting match is over.
In emergencies, though, it's also useful to remember some of the ed commands. I don't think there's a UNIX system in existence that doesn't have ed lurking down there in
Debunking the "Apple Ripped Off Xerox PARC" Myth (Score:5, Informative)
Apple borrowed a number of elements from PARC research, but not all of them, and it did pay for the ones it did borrow. More details at: http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_history.html [mackido.com].
Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing (Score:2, Informative)
Back in that day, Windows 1.0 pretty much had to be given away. Early Windows apps came bundled with a 'runtime' version of Windows that would be installed as part of the process of installing the App. This in effect made the Windows/App bundle into a temporary run-time Windows environment.
The boxed copy of In*A*Vision in my collection comes with a runtime version of Windows 1.03.
Re:Methaphors, Forms (Score:4, Informative)
A whole bunch, actually.
The interesting part is, modern GUIs integrate both the "book" and "channel" metaphors alongside the "papers on a desk" metaphor. I certainly know that I don't use overlapping windows for anything but file-sorting; every program I run (exempting IM and Winamp) is maximized, and I switch between the tasks with the fundamental windows keyboard command, Alt+tab.)
Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting a better file system metaphor. Toss the "files and folders" lie, skip the "everything is a file" concept, and hop right into "Hard Drive is a database."
Re:pedigree (Score:2, Informative)
Or the reverse could be argued. Lots of people here who are bigtime Linux/Unix advocates have made the case that one of the big problems with Windows NT is that the GUI is built in, whereas with Linux/Unix the GUI is seperate and not even necessary to the functionality of the whole. When Microsoft went from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 one of the bad things they did was integrate the Graphics into the NT kernel, which reduced reliability considerably, and sabatogued the microkernel design.
That last paragraph sounds like you read it off a fax direct from Apple Marketing.
the people of PARC (Score:2, Informative)
Irrelevant trivia : Palo Alto means "tall pole" in spanish.
*sigh* Apple didn't "Steal" the GUI from Xerox (Score:5, Informative)
The early Lisa and Macintosh machines were less powerful than the last generation Xerox machines, but had better software support. The Xerox had several impressive demos, but most were incomplete. By 1985, the Macintosh had Mac Write, Mac Paint, Mac Draw, Hypercard, several Postscript-based illustration and DTP applications, and the very first GUI versions of MS Word and Excel.
Search the web for Apple/Xerox myths, you'll find the real story from several credible sources, including Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) who was still with the company at the time. www.woz.org may be a good start.
If it makes you feel any better, you may want to think of Apple as getting a taste of their own medicine with the Newton project. Like Xerox that pioneered a new area of computing, but allowed other companies to mass market smaller/cheaper models, Apple left the PDA market just as it began to take off. The Newtons were impressive technology demos, but were large and expensive and still had some quirks. Two years after Apple discontinued the Newton, everyone had a Palm.
Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Apple had been planning the Lisa over a year before Job's visit, bit-mapped screen and mouse included. The Apple people mainly wanted to look at Smalltalk (too bad Jobs didn't "steal" that). They weren't particularly impressed with the laser printer or ethernet (Jobs was supposed to have hated networks with a passion).
The quote above was probably largely motivated by the (realized) fear that the microcomputer manufacturers would bastardize the idea of personal computing (the general view seems to have been that they were bright ignoramuses who completely ignored what the rest of the computer community was doing).
Re:Little known facts (Score:1, Informative)
Yep, there was also a "star trek" game played across the net as well. Nohting like flying through a sector of space then find yourself surrounded by 100's of Klingon's and being turned into space dust! E-mail was cool, and yea, playing missile command with a 3 button mouse and a portrait monitor, very COOL!
Yes, the machines uses the AMD 2901 bit slice processor, 16 bit. The Star stations were seutp to be LISP systems as well for the DOD. The Star enviroment was also crafted for the Gov't., we used a "stripped" version, more like the "typical" GUI interface today.
After being spoiled at Xerox for ~ 2 years, I left and the first computer I purchased was a MAC. Been a MAC HEAD ever since. My, we've come a long way baby!
New book on PARC's strategy and offspring (Score:2, Informative)
It describes what PARC was looking for in its research, the many spin-offs that we've heard of, and proposes a post-PARC theory for tech R&D funding / thinking with research from Intel, IBM, Lucent and others. I've posted a full review at http://www.mironov.com/pb/mar03.html
Strongly recommended!