Slashdot Mirror
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*
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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/
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!