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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers
mccalli writes "The National Academy of Engineering has awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize to various individuals 'for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers.' The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing."
So often I see credit for "the gui" going to Apple, when it's these guys who should be getting the real credit. More work in GUI design, more original thought and more of the first hard yards in GUI systems were put in by the Alto originators than Apple's work, which was just in mass marketing an already existing product.
Kudos to them I say
RST
The Alto's computer was a rack-mounted Data General minicomputer with some special microcode. Xexox built the mouse, Ethernet adapter, and CRT, but manufacture of the computer was outsourced.
The real history of the GUI is that the first GUI appeared on the SAGE air defense system. The SAGE pointing device was a light gun. After light guns came light pens and the "RAND tablet", the first tablet input device. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in the late 1960s, and put together an impressive GUI demo, but he had to tie up an entire mainframe to make it work. The Alto was basically an attempt to squeeze down the technology into a useful size.
Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.
The Xerox PARC approach was to create technology that was futuristic but not cost effective, with the idea that progress in electronics would bring the cost down. That was exactly right.
What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.
That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.