That '70s Show: the Conference That Predicted the Future of Work (wired.com)

theodp writes: Over at Wired, Leslie Berlin writes about Futures Day at the 1977 Xerox World Conference, an invitation-only demonstration of the Alto personal computer system developed at Xerox PARC. It's an excerpt from Troublemakers: How a Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future. Both Berlin's book and Brian Dear's recent The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture are shedding light on groundbreaking systems of the '70s that were ultimately done in by the less-featured but low-cost Apple II (yes, $2,638 for a system with 48 kB of RAM was 'low cost'!) and other personal computers. Interestingly, Dear notes that the Xerox Parc and PLATO teams sent people out to see and learn and exchange ideas with each other over the years. Their interactions included 'tremendous battles' over the advantages and disadvantages of mouse interfaces [Xerox] vs. touch screens [PLATO], as well as plasma displays [PLATO] vs. other, cheaper display solutions [Xerox]. As is the case with many debates, both teams proved to be "right." Apple wouldn't introduce the masses to a mouse interface until 1984 [Macintosh] and a touch screen interface until 2007 [iPhone].

Comments

Casio wrist watch had touch in 1983

[TigerPlish]

I had a Casio tc-50 calculator watch in 1983 that was touch screen. And not that pathetic bendy screen like cheap touch devices - this was a proper glass-faced capacitive touch.

I miss that watch.

Re: Casio wrist watch had touch in 1983

[Hal_Porter]

Justin Trudeau frequently reminds millennials of $(CURRENT_YEAR)

Rule of thumb

[Anonymous Coward]

The computer you want always costs $2500.

Re: Orange Glow?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The economyâ(TM)s booming like never before

If you ignore anything before the 1970s, right?

Re:Huh?

[mikael]

Xerox were geared up to do R&D, not marketing, sales, advertising, customer feedback, technical support and all the other corporate divisions required by a whole systems manufacturer. The usual product development cycle is put something out to market, get customer feedback, look at what other competitors are doing, get one step ahead of them, add new features requested by customers and marketing, then repeat.

Just look at the size of the main chassis. How would you convince office departments that they need workstations the size of office desks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Huh?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Wasn't the Alto from 1973? Why did they wait four years to show it off? And I thought they only showed it off to Apple, privately? And basically sold the rights to the ideas to them because they couldn't figure out what to do with the expensive machine developed in their "dream labs"?

Also, "upstarts"? Is that the same as "startups"?

No, the Alto was kind of already in limited production by the time the Apple team got their tour of PARC.

Xerox did license/sell the rights to some of the GUI patents to them in exchange for $150 mil. (IIRC) in Apple Stock.

I wonder...

[jbmartin6]

Were these notions of computing successful because they were the best ideas? Or just because they were early enough to be adopted and fill the niche? Someday, aliens might come to Earth and show us their PCs, and we will facepalm and wonder why we didn't think of that.

Re:I wonder...

[mikael]

There are plenty of stories of technologies that were ahead of their time, but the market didn't exist at that time. On the other side, there are stories of technologies that arrived on the market late in the game and couldn't get past the incumbent who already had majority market share.