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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."

3 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.