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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."
A more detailed timeline for the awards is available here
Alltogether there are five of them, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the Founders Award, and the Arthur M. Bueche Award
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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 prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people...
Headling which was a prelude to this one...
Two Xerox Employees Fired Over Butt-Copying Incident, footage at 11....
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.....
Other developments from PARC are the Graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer and the Smalltalk programming language.
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!!
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.