Xerox Alto Computer 30th Anniversary

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."

*cork pop*

[KefkaFloyd]

Well, happy 30th anniversary to them! PARC has provided us with far more than just the GUI, though that is what it is most notable for. PARC has churned out a lot of innovations and I hope it continues as long as Xerox is willing to fund it (which is in their best interest, IMO, a lot of IP comes out of it).

Alternatives to the GUI

[questamor]

If they (and the followon effects, such as apples machines, and windows etc) hadn't created the GUI as we now have it - which in many ways is unchanged, ie overlapping windows, mouse, etc... what kind of interface would we have?

I'm willing to accept it was a pretty good jump of thought to create the gui on a bitmapped display after so much text-only based human-computer-interaction, but are there other ways of interfacing? perhaps other GUI ideas that we don't see just because they weren't first, and hence now the most developed?

Re:Happy Birthday!

[leereyno]

While this is a little off topic, I'd just like to point out that Steve Jobs saw all that stuff at PARC because his people took him there to see it. They'd already seen it all, in fact some of them came to Apple from PARC. The reason for the effort? Because in order to get Steve Jobs to go along with a good idea it is necessary to make him think he came up with it himself.

Lee

Re:*cork pop*

[Syre]

Yes, they talked about the 3M computer: 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels on the screen and 1000 bytes of RAM, with a graphical interface and a mouse.

The Alto was the first computer that met that design goal.

That same year, Xerox came out with the first laser printer and an ethernet network that connected the printer and workstations. The original network ran at 3Mbps.

See PARC's History page [xerox.com]

Markov != history

[Multics]

We must always remember this story is written by John Markov, whose career is based in part on a set of half truths about Kevin Mitnick (who is by no means a saint) and other spin-based technology reporting. Some of the dotcom frenzy could have been moderated if he'd reported truth instead of illusion from his bully pulpit.

Given the previous mis-reporting (and I was around in the early 70s) I take issue with any one person or organization getting 'credit' for personal computing. It was time, in the industry, to do this. Already in tbe back of Scienctific American were half a dozen companies advertisting mini-computers that were targeted to a single researcher. I was on PDP 8s and soon thereafter PDP 11s which were mostly being used to support single people.

Allen Kay shold get credit for bringing to prominance the windowing environments that most of us now use.

-- Multics

Re:I'm not too sure that the Windows 1.0 thing

[petrilli]

No offense, but Bob Taylor is not the most disinterested source to quote. If you read Dealers in Lightning, you'll get a better view of what was going on at PARC at the time. I've met a bunch of people at PARC at various points, and most understand that the biggest flaw was the disconnect between PARC's goals and Xerox' goals. PARC was very long-term, and focused on innovation, where-as Xerox was very focused on what would help them next quarter.

For many reasons, Xerox was never going to capitalize on the Star. I've owned various D* machines (my last a Dandelion), and they were great, but they were $16,000 new, and made the Lisa look zippy and cheap. Xerox lost this game pretty fair and square. Bob Taylor was brilliant, but never ever to articulate to management what he was doing, and more importantly, how Xerox as a Fortune 10 company could use it to build a better marketplace.

It's a lot of sour apples, no pun intended, if you ask me.

How often do you boot, anyway?

[alispguru]

people forget all too quickly that amachine that takes 10 minute to boot is a worthless piece of crap.

Well, that depends on how often you boot it, doesn't it? At the time, Lisp machines took a long time to boot, but they stayed up for months at a time. Altos in use as file servers had similar uptimes. You must have had to boot your Lisa a lot if their time to boot was a big concern.

One reason Altos and their kin took a long time to boot was the multiple layers in the OS - boot loaders that load microcode loaders that load image loaders that load images... Once while I was working on a complex diagram on a Star, I selected a group of objects and punched "Ungroup". The screen went black for a few seconds, and a different-looking window system popped up, called "Pilot". A few windows scrolled, the screen went black, and a more primitive-looking window system appeared, calling itself "CoPilot". This one printed some stuff to a window and vanished, and a very simple window system appeared, called "CoCoPilot". After a little more screen activity, the screen went black again for a few seconds, and my original Star session appeared again! I quickly saved my diagram and was quite weirded out for the rest of the afternoon...