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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."
he is the great uncle of John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, the infamous phone hacker.
I'm wondering if the Captain will get a prize someday.....
Nice try but Windows UI preceded the JOINTLY DEVELOPED IBM/Microsoft Presentation Manager UI (first shown in OS/2 1.1) which was a merger of Microsoft's Windows UI and IBM's Common User Access (CUA). CUA sought to make everything from PC GUIs to 3278 green-screen terminals look the same and just ended up with a least-common-denominator unusable UI.
The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing.
So, besides bias, is there a reason that these institutions were mentioned, but not Microsoft?
"Charles P. Thacker also is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Corp."
Geez...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
i don't see apple catching up there.
Amen. While the single-button might be "less intimidating," Apple has really left that image behind. Now it's more of a "computer for hip people. you wanna be hip? buy apple." Even hip people can use two buttons. And Apple has enough of a design staff that they could build a work-of-art pointing device with 6 buttons that also made you coffee while you waited.
I understand that a USB mouse from another manufacturer works; my point is that if it's not standard, there's less of an incentive to write for it.
(On a sidenote, has anyone ever tried the UT2k3 demo on a demo Mac? Horrid. Missing the secondary fires really limits UT.)
"A group of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that... is... irony!" - Bender
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates borrowed
their ides for the GUI and mouse and such from
not only Xerox PARC but from the Smalltalk
environment. Smalltalk is not just a language, its a Object Oriented operating environment.. Its hard to call it an operating system even though it controlled resources on the machine,
and its not really just a language because it allows the users to change the workings of the language and the operating environment at any time.. Its just a massively self-referencing OO environment.. And everything we know of GUI's and mice and such today was based on smalltalk and the machine designed around it..
Just Xerox was not smart enough to cash in on it because it was so far before its time that there were few with much power to exploit it and sell it.. PARC as was explained at the time was a campus full of nerds designing stuff that made sense without the constraints that usually hold down projects, like having to make money. They had enough money to develop this system.. But certainly nobody was foofing off.. Its hard to know exactly what was involved in the development, what led to it and if this can ever happen again..
Get a big company with lots of money and poor resource management, get a lot of smart people who are driven to solve problems, keep the lawyers off campus.. Make sure the nerds are absolutely clueless about business and making money.. Remember at the time, nobody was making money selling software much.. The idea was to sell a machine.. Xerox sold hardware not software.. I don't think this can ever happen again.. There is just too much to take for granted, like that anyone can take the software and go sell a piece of it or release it on the Internet..
Just say no to license servers!!
...or was she still just a backroom player, still (re)working her way up the development ladder?
For those that don't know about Lynn, she developed the first superscalar computer back in '61, the IBM ACS, and went on to develop much of the tech for VLSI. She spent much time at Parc during the '70's too, which is why I was wondering.
There's something else very special about her as well, which endears her to me for similar reasons.
When I was a college student, I did a co-op assignment at Xerox in Webster, NY, where I had the chance to play with an Alto at lunchtimes. It was an impressive machine, the size of a dishwasher, with a strange mouse arrangement and a crisp, big monochrome bitmap display.
I have fond memories of playing Mazewar (a VERY early real-time networked multi-player 3D VR game, one of the very first FPS games, I suspect) on the Alto in between system crashes.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.
I wasn't there, but I don't think your facts are entirely correct.
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.
No laptop on the market is as thin and light as the cardboard model, though they are often smaller in the other dimensions since they fold. Kay was thinking about the early 1980s, so the fact that they are much faster than his estimates is to be expected. About cost, if you read his original papers he claimed that in the future it was likely that companies would give away the hardware for free to sell content. The Alto of the early 1970s was, of course, very expensive.
The first attempt to turn this technology into a product was the 8086 based Notetaker in 1978, which I doubt would have cost as much as a piano (or the 1981 Xerox Star).
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.
Smalltalk came with all the sources. I agree that this was because the main company didn't care about it (just like early releases of Unix by Bell Labs). My point is that the people receiving this award can't be blamed for this "feature".
The Macintosh initially only came with MacPaint and MacWrite. They didn't want to scare away third party developers like the Lisa and Star had.
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.
The machine I am typing this on (Linux+KDE) sure looks far more like an Alto than CP/M.
For those interested in a more informed opinion of what happened back then than they are likely to read in Slashdot, check out what Alan Kay said at the Prize ceremony.