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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."
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
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.
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
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.
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.