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Xerox Alto Computer 30th Anniversary

Posted by michael on from the back-in-the-day dept.

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."

12 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. It's kind of like LISP. by PHAEDRU5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You get it right first time, so why bother changing?

    --
    668: Neighbour of the Beast
  2. Methaphors, Forms by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Well, any user interface starts out as some kind of metaphor. The dominant file system organization, for example, borrows the ideas of files and folders from simple paper filing systems. By the same token, the overlapping windows GUI is just a metaphor for a desk with a lot of papers on it. So your question really devolves into this one: what other good GUI metaphors are there? I can't think of any, but then I'm pretty bad at thinking visually.

    Not quite offtopic: back in the late 70s, some workstation designers decided they could do an intuitive user interface without waiting for bitmap displays to become affordable. The result was the form-based user interface of the CTOS operating system, which ran on special proprietary hardware. Of course, like most proprietary systems, it was driven from the marketplace by IBM compatibles. Too bad, really.

    1. Re:Methaphors, Forms by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 2, Interesting

      yay...CTOS....when I worked for the State Of Michigan 2 years ago as network support, they were JUST phasing those systems out for storing data for Child protective services.....man that interface sucked.

      --



      I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  3. Anyone have a Star/Alto they want 2 find a home 4? by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been searching for one for 3 years now...

  4. pedigree by BWJones · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."

    I believe the pedigree should read: "the Xerox Alto and Star pioneered the GUI and mouse navigation in 1980 and 1981. these elements of the operating system while brought to the business mainstream by the Apple Lisa in 1982 (one year behind schedule), were brought to the common PC user in 1984 with the Macintosh."

    Including Windows 1.0 in this company is a joke as Windows 1.0 was nothing more than a shell and not a true OS. In fact, it could be argued that Windows was a shell with DOS being the real OS up until Windows 98.

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    1. Re:pedigree by BWJones · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I was responding to your comment: I wouldn't say that MacOS was really an 'os' anymore than the Windows 1.0 shell running on top of MS-DOS. My question still stands, and my point was that the MacOS was very different from Windows 1.0 running on DOS.

      What difference does it make if it's a shell running on top of an OS, or an OS that has the shell embedded in it. Either one is an OS, and MacOS (before they gave up and just bought NextStep, the same way Microsoft bought the first version of MS-DOS, from an outside vendor) is pretty much just as anaemic, or more so, than MS-DOS with Windows on top as a shell.

      You are backtracking from your earlier statements now. It could be argued that having a GUI interface running on top of the operating system is much less efficient than having the GUI as a fundamental part of the OS. All those years of running IRIX and X-windows environments in IRIX and now OS X and X-windows environments on OS X have made that more than clear to me. Where Classic MacOS really excelled was the integration that the GUI had with the OS. The Classic MacOS GUI was not a shell. Take networking for example: Networking with the original Macintosh was a breeze. Simply plug the machines in to the network click maybe three or four times and you are connected to the network. Doing this with Windows 1.0 was an exercise in frustration, so calling the MacOS anemic with respect to Windows 1.0 even with this one example is more than a little disingenuous. Hell, even with modern versions of Windows, getting on a network is much more labor intensive than it needs be.

      Your Mac zeal is showing.

      After 20 or so years of using personal computers and workstations of many kinds including Sun, SGI, Wintel, Osbourne, Altair, TRS-80's and Apple ]['s, I have since the 80's preferred the MacOS, and I continue to do so with OS X. It is simply a more efficient way of getting work accomplished combined with a greater return on investment. If one has a job to perform, and they make more than 10 or 20 $$'s/hour, they should not have to be spending time trying to make their computers do what they want and minimal time should be spent on keeping them up and running. Apple computers have proven themselves to be efficient tools and as such I will continue to use them in my research career and my personal life and am happy to do so.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  5. Little known facts by soundofthemoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I worked at Xerox (not PARC) in the 80s, we had an Alto lab with a dozen or so Altos. They were so cool. Besides all the visible features, what really made them kick was that they had programmable microcode. So you could code up a new high-level instruction set and build your own language. This was how the Smalltalk-72 VM was implemented. They also had removable hard disk platters. Something the size of a pizza that held about 2.5MB. And besides the 3-button mouse, they had a 5-key chord keyboard - right hand mousing, left hand chording, it was a surprisingly fast way to edit.

    The other totally fun thing about the Altos was they supported network games. My favorite was Mazewars. This was almost certainly the first multiplayer FPS game in the world. Everyone played an identical looking eyeball. You zipped around a maze and shot each other (with withering glares, I guess). But you really needed to be good on the chord keyset to win.

  6. Apple Lisa (MacXL) booted up nearly10 times faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Apple Lisa (MacXL) booted up nearly10 times faster than the poorly written ALTO. True, the lisa was written in high level languages , except for a few critical bits in assembler, but the alto was a sick pig.

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

    (regardless of its average up time).

    Apple paid for the stuff (however minor) that zeorx did first.

    hurray Apple, The Mac won (MS windows is a tribute to the macs inventions).

  7. Apple Lisa Interface.. by euxneks · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone else think that the simplicity of the OS on Apple Lisa looks extremely attractive? Maybe it's just late at night... =)

    --
    in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
  8. Altogether: a Xerox Alto simulator by Eric+Smith · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Last year I did some work on Altogether, a microcode-level Alto simulator. It does not yet include simulation of the disk or 3 Mbps Ethernet hardware, which will be necessary in order to boot useful Alto software.

    Because almost all of the interesting Alto software used the writable control store, it is important to simulate the Alto at the microcode level. The Alto used horizontal microcode, so several operations are done in each clock cycle, which IIRC was 170 ns. On an Athlon XP 1900+, the CPU simulation runs at about 1/4 real time. In order to obtain better performance, it will be necessary to do quite a bit of optimization, possibly including binary translation of the microcode into native host code.

    There's no packaged release of the Altogether code, but it can be checked out from CVS.

  9. Ahead of their time.... by jemenake · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Steve Jobs has said that, at the time he visited PARC, they demoed three technologies for him: OO-programming, graphical user interfaces, and LANs.

    He said that he was so blown away by just one of the techs (the GUI, of course), that the potential of the other two were completely lost on him.

    It boggles my mind how far ahead of the curve the PARC guys were. Imagine going to a demo session and having the demonstrators show you a working quantum computing laptop running from a fuel-cell with a virtual holographic 360-degree 3-D display. It must have been something like that... where each advancement is so groundbreaking that you can only absorb one of them in a sitting.

  10. Re:*cork pop* by javiercero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hum... I thought that it was the PERQ the first machine to meet this challenge. I think the 3M challenge was put forward by CMU, and Three Rivers (the group that produced the PERQ) was made mostly of people from CMU. The 3M challenge was supposed to portray what workstations would be like by the mid 80s, I think the Alto was the main inspiration for the PERQ though....

    The 3M challenge asked for a network of distributed workstations, each of which should be able to process 1MIPs, hold 1MB of RAM, and display at least 1Mpixels. CMU scientist guessed that networks of such machines would mean the end of timesharing by the mid/late 80's.

    Oh man, I feel old :-).