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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."
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).
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
*ducks*
They gave us (and Xerox) the laser printer.
I just like the screen shot of the "mouse with steel ball" and more notoriously, "the reboot screen after a crash." Somethings never change.
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.
A URL For those who don't want to register
If you had a 1024 node cluster of these things you could load windowsXP in just under 3 months.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
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?
It says
Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
You get it right first time, so why bother changing?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
There was a neat little dos program that once came with a Logitech mouse called "popdos". It looked very similar to Windows 1.0. The interesting part is that popdos originated from the same place as OpenOffice.
Can be found here -- 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 by an Alto collector.
Neat machine. I think I want one now.
-----
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
It also led to GEOS on the Commodore 64!
Some screenshots
And, let's not forget a TRUE genius and pioneer, Doug Englebart. 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!
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.
I wrote an
SoupIsGood Food
Have you ever used Windows 1.0? I managed to get it running in Virtual PC one day; it was nothing more than a glorified DOS shell with a calculator and word processing app. The Lisa on the other hand, actually did some useful things, and had a somewhat graceful GUI; nicely shaded grays are much nicer than that 4 color CGA monstrosity that was Windows 1.0.
.
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?
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
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
vi is simple, powerfull and easy to use.
oo
vi is simple, powerfull and easy to use.
q:q
Apple never 'stole' from Xerox.
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.
Man and Goat
I've been searching for one for 3 years now...
...and fvwm and olvm look no more advanced the xerox star.
Thank god KDE and Gnome came around. Its amazing that until the turn of the century unix users had 1970's gui's.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
I remember using AOL for DOS (shudder) for my 286 since compuserve was too expensive and the gui used was Geos.
They made dos toolkits for developers and it was a pretty gui. I had great looking icons and everything on my 16 color cga monitor. It looked alot like the WIndows/Mac version.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
I think it was. I know I wanted one very very badly at that time. Even today those screen shots look very usable. By usable I mean it had a gui that is simular to what we all use today, it had the all purpose application of the day AppleWorks amoung others. It also had the imagewriter (maybe even the v2 model). It also had a lot of games available which isnt all that bad either.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Both them and Apple keep pointing it out. Jobs made a mistake and thought they did; so the Apple people worked hard trying to duplicate something that didn't exist.
Just to nitpick a bit... :)
:).
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.)
The thing I love about Xerox is that it reminds us all that Windows didn't rip off Apple, they ripped off Apple who was ripping off Xerox. It's interesting to think about what it would have been like if Xerox would have been in control of the computer market, since they had everything that we use today, and gave it away when they could have sold it.
Thanks Xerox.
Indeed. The common misconception is that Apple "stole" the concept from the PARC, when it was more along the lines of a random friend of a PARC researcher (who happened to be a Mac team member) was invited, checked it out, told Jobs, and then Jobs gave Xerox millions in stock for a technology that Xerox thought was useless at best and a piece of shit at worst.
It's like if you had a shitty G.I. Joe missing an arm, a guy buys it from you for $10,000 and then fixes it up to near-mint and eBays it for $100,000. Hardly stealing.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
Why did Xerox just put it all away though and let others develop it.
It was like the Vikings went to America and did nothing with the knowledge and it had to wait until Columbus went back to America (having read the Viking accounts) and then told everyone about it.
Full kudos to Xerox for ingenuity but not much else.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
Those of us who run UNIX on machines like my Toshiba 486 laptop sorta resent you putting down FVWM. It works really well. It's disappointing that big fsking aircraft carrier bloatware desktops seem to be the defacto standard now.
Looks aren't everything, you know.
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I could have sworn that it was a charactor based system.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Try WindowMaker. Its my favorite when using my old p166 adn its themeable and looks really cool. Uses very little resources as well.
http://saveie6.com/
There were a few valid productivity apps for Windows 1.0. Micrografx In*A*Vision was a pretty nice vector-based drawing program. It evolved into Designer, the techie's preferred alternative to the more flouncy CorelDraw.
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.
In the early 1980's, I worked for a software spin-off of an engineering company that was going down the tubes rapidly. One Friday I went to work to find:
1) A very polite policeman at the door.
2) No electricity.
3) No management people.
4) Confused employees.
5) An envelope at my desk with a check for 1/2 of my pay.
6) On the memo line, it read: "WYSIWYG"
7...
8) no profit.
Thanks for the tip. If I ever upgrade to a p166 it'll probably be something I'll try. Mine is a 486DX-2 50.
Ciryon
Didnt the Lisa run Apple // programs as well?
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
heh...yeah...if you have 50k I am sure some one will give you their's.......rememeber that there are a lot of colectors out there willing to pay big bucks for those old systems.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Here's $10,000. Good luck funding a vintage Xerox Alto for that price on eBay.
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).
Well, of course, it was not a copy machine.
The management at Xerox seems to downplay anything that is not a copy machine, and tries to bury it as fast as they can.
>Make sure its 30-pin fast page or fpram which is >the only one that will work with your 486 laptop. 72 >pin is for the desktops and 30 is for laptops.
With due respect, this is gibberish.
30-pin RAM came first. It was 8 bits wide (9 with parity) so you needed four to make a full bank for a 386/486.
72-pin came later. It filled a 386/486 bank with 32 bits (36 with parity)
Some 486s took only 30-pin. Some only took 72-pin. Some took both. Interestingly, there may even be 286 and 386 systems that took 72-pin. (Magnavox did a 286/386SX system using a board with a 72-pin socket)
However, that probably won't do much for a laptop. Many laptops of the era take manufacturer-specific cards.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I remember Popdos! I too got it with my first (logitech) mouse. I had it set to come up on boot on my Compaq 286 lunchbox (think 3" thick laptop). It was more like Midnight Commander (2 pane text mode file manager) though IIRC.
Those were the days.
DCMonkey
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
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.
But this proves indeed that they were ripped off.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The laptop in question has the full compliment of 28 megs of RAM that is physically possible for it's design. It's a proprietary 24 meg module added to the pitiful 4 megs stock in that model. I specifically bought it second hand five years ago to run Linux on. It's the ultimate hacker's Toshiba 486, the T2105. The last and best Grayscale VGA Toshiba ever made. For some reason the marketing goons at Toshiba recycled the 2105 model number several years later for a newer model. It causes a lot of confusion when researching this particular model online.
Bob Taylor headed the labs at PARC in those days. They say that at its height he had 76 of the top 100 computers people in the country working for him. His management technique was simple: Just bring a lot of brilliant people together and give them enough money and time to carry out whatever research they wanted. and they came up with the mouse, bitmapped screens and the ethernet cable. Douglas Englebart worked there and was(is) one of the great unsung heros of the multimedia revolution.
Irrelevant trivia : Palo Alto means "tall pole" in spanish.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
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.
While many Xerox engineers and even more techies outside of the company were sad to see Xerox discontinue GUI efforts beyond the Alto and Star, this was the full intention of the company's executives. At the time, Xerox was a copy machine company, the powers that be had no interest in making any sort of computer. In return for information, cooperation, and to somewhat return the favor, Apple gave Xerox a large amount of Apple stock. Apple didn't "buy" the GUI from Xerox, neither did they "steal" the GUI. About the only thing they "stole" were some engineers that moved to Apple to continue GUI work (Apple's former chief scientist, Larry Tessler, for example).
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.
Bugger I can't. Multi-user is an MS feature and not an MS bug.
How about Linux? Can I get One-user on Linux then? I can't? Multiuser is still a feature and not a bug?
Bugger.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
Or read Fire In The Valley, the book that the film is based on. Both the book and the film are excellent.
Wow, I'd heard that there were people who run every program maximized, but I'd never met any.
Lucky you, stupid web designers build their sites for you!
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The AC has a point. I worked with a guy who used to be a Xerox Star salesman. He said that they used to arrange that the machines be booted ahead of time. If they crashed for any reason, you'd just walk out, because once the customer saw how long they took to boot you'd never sell one.
The Alto and Star had a number of dubious design decisions that led to the incredibly large boot time and low reliability. One was that the filesystem implemented disk allocation via a simple linked list; no file allocation table. If you want to get to block 250 of a file, you had to read the first 249 to follow the chain of pointers. Yeeesh.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Only collectable system that fetches those types of prices are Apple I's, as far as I know. Though it wouldn't suprise me to see it get $2000-$3000, I guess, lord knows any of the old IMSAI stuff can get that on ebay.
Try googling Xerox consent decree and you will discover that Xerox neither mistakenly gave away nor generosly gave up their technology --they were forced by the government. That's government as in by the people of the people for the people. Too bad we gave up on that form of government in the US.
The public domain has to be taken by force, it always has been and always will be. There is no room for charity in monoploly plans.
I still keep it real yo! TWM all the way on most of my machines... it is butt ugly for most people, but I like the simple 2D look of it, plus I can make it tabbed ala BeOS. It is fast, light on resources, and it runs equally well on my old Sparc IPX than on my new Athlon 2000.....
:-). All that I ask for my window manager is that it handles my windows just like I command it to, and it gets out of the way, I do not need no frikking fireworks display everytime I open a damn application.
If you really need all that color candy for your desktop environment (GNOME, and KDE as major suspects) that means that you are not doing real work... most of the action takes place INSIDE the window, not at the BORDERS
An old Xeroid, me... used a 6085 for a couple of years, which was then replaced by GlobalView running on a SPARC - 'till we then upgraded everyone to PC's running Win3.11 - I don't miss the 6085's much (took _forever_ to boot up).
Try asking on comp.sys.xerox - that's the kind of thing that USENET group was originally set up for... even though nowadays its mostly used for people asking about printer drivers and Metacode converters, folks with 6085's, etc. still check it out periodically.
Have fun!
OldFart 8-)
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
Outside shed, climate controlled with a nice big concrete slab floor. I have a few 220v receptacles and such, I store most of my mini-computers out there.
Yes, I do want one. I wouldn't butcher it and see if I could put a Athlon motherboard in it, or any of the other bullshit you see people doing with treasures like this. I'm willing to do the research to restore it, if it's not in working condition. And if it can be networked to a modern computer, I will do so... maybe even letting some respectul individuals use it remotely (as I do with some of my other oddball computers).
I may not be a museum curator, but I would provide a good home for it. I wouldn't even sell the thing if I couldn't keep it, I know a few like-minded individuals who become it's caretaker.
Oh, and finally, I'm fairly safe from most natural disasters in my area.
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).
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Several folks from PARC are now at Adobe. I work with one of them - Ed McCreight - and he's just a great guy. Very, very smart but more important, an incredibly nice chap. He's the sort of person who you literally can't image ever having done anything malicious. He's also one of those people who seem to be interested in just about everything; a true renaissance man. Adobe is a wonderful place to work for many reasons but for me, getting to work with Ed is definitely at the top of the list.
Oh, a related note: I read an interesting book recently, titled "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film". It's basically a transcript of conversations between Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient) and Walter Murch. Murch is a film and sound editor (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, THX 1138, American Graffiti) and from the book, reminds me of Ed: a very smart guy and a real expert in a specific area but also a person who is interested in a huge array of topics. It's an excellent book.
fh
Try WindowMaker. Its my favorite when using my old p166 adn its themeable and looks really cool. Uses very little resources as well.
Windowmaker is my favorite. I just really love the dock style of GUI. I even use it on my more powerful Athlon.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I have an Altos 586TX with Xenix on it, I would be happy to sell/get rid of if you're interested. It's got a tons of docs and software, but I don't have the password for root or any logins... maybe you can hack it somehow.. email: downerczx@yahoo.com
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.
On the other hand, it's much easier to find a second-generation Star system, the Xerox 6085, known as the Daybreak. As of a year ago, people around here were still giving those away.
Getting the Star software running is much harder than acquiring the hardware. Generally you need a server as well (typically an 8090 Daylight), and a license key. It is possible to get it running standalone, but that's not how it was normally used.
The software was renamed from Star to Globalview. There actually was a Windows version of it, GVWin. GVWin was still written in Mesa. Fuji/Xerox also had a product that implemented the Mesa byte code interpreter on a PC.
When I was in kindergarten, my father bought a Lisa for his office. I'm now married with kids, so that gives you some idea of how long ago this was. I remember playing with it when I was a kid.
To this day, my father claims the Lisa was the best machine he has ever used. All the applications were completely integrated in a way that DOS and even Windows apps weren't for many years. You could draw up a diagram in the paint program and paste it into the word processing program easily. It was so solid that, AFAIK, it was still being used in the office just a few years ago and may still be there today.
A Star would suit me just fine, I think. Thanks for the extra keyword (daybreak), incorporating that into my Ebay search as we speak.
:(
As for Alto's being rarer than an Apple I, that would mean fewer than 150. I can't think of any computer system that would be rarer, off the top of my head. Shame how corporate disposal policies are killing all sorts of historical computers.
Software is always the bitch though, isn't it? An acquaintance of mine has a Cray supercomputer, I think it's going on 2 years now... still can't find a copy/license of Unicos. My DECstation (MIPS cpu, needs ultrix, not osf/tru64) has been sitting under my desk for 3 years, and it's annoying. I've managed to dig up nearly every major, and many minor, version of OpenVMS, and still can't find ultrix.
Hint: If anyone wants to discuss the quasi-legal exchange of esoteric OS's, I'm the guy you are looking for...
Well, I was under the impression that there were as many as 60-70 known Apple I's left. Out of 150-200 in the beginning.
But to think that 2500 (to 4500?) Alto's might have been pared down to fewer than 100 is sad indeed.
Note: The Xerox Alto is distinct and different from an "Altos" (name of the company) anything.
Out of the 1800 Beboxen ever built, wonder how many surive?
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...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Just published: "Open Innovation" by Hank Chesbrough, $24.50 on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578518377/ . .
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!