Xerox Alto (1973)
The Xerox Alto was an early personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. The Alto was the first system to bring together all of the components of the modern Graphical User Interface. The Alto was designed and constructed by Xerox for research and, though Xerox donated a quantity of them to different organizations, they were never sold commercially.
The Alto was first conceived in 1972 in a memorandum written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) produced by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and was configured primarily by Chuck Thacker. Due to the success of the pilot run, the Xerox team advanced to create approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.
The original Alto's incorporated:
- Bit-mapped black and white display sized 606x808
- 5.8 MHz CPU
- 128KB of memory (at the cost of $4,000)
- 2.5MB removable cartridge hard drive
- Three button mouse
- 64-key keyboard
The Alto's display was the same dimensions as a regular (8.5"x11") sheet of paper, aligned vertically. An Alto cost $10,000 (1973) to build. The researchers immediately set out producing additional systems and developing software to operate on the computer. By the end of 1973, PARC had 10 Altos; by the next summer, the lab had 40. The Alto's user interface adopted many themes from the work of Doug Engelbart.
Development proceeded for the Alto for most of the 1970s, contributing progressive new features in hardware and software. The PARC Altos were connected together in a local area network employing a new networking technology named Ethernet. The first WYSIWYG word processor, Bravo was produced for the Alto. A great deal of the software developed for the Alto was written in Smalltalk, among the first object-oriented programing languages. The following are a few of the software applications available for the Alto:
- Gypsy - Easy to use WYSIWYG word processor
- Laurel - Network E-mail client
- Markup and Draw - Painting and graphics manipulation
- Neptune - File manager
- FTP and chat utilities
- Games - Chess, Pinball, Othello and a Star Trek game
Near the spring of 1978, Altos were being utilized in four test sites: the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Atlantic Richfield Company, and the Santa Clara, California, and the offices of Xerox's copier sales division. Xerox donated a total of 50 Altos to Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and University of Rochester. Xerox management rejected creating a commercially obtainable version of the Alto for many years. A presentation given to employees of Apple Computer at PARC of the Alto heavily influenced Steve Jobs plans for the Macintosh. The Xerox Star, the first commercial product to use many of the Alto's ideas was released in 1981, just prior to the first IBM PC, at the cost of $16,000.
The Xerox Alto is regarded by many to be the first personal computer. The Alto greatly shaped the design of personal computers in the succeeding decades, and it is today very rare and a precious collector's item.
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