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Xerox Alto

The Xerox Alto was a groundbreaking personal computer developed by engineers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and first operational in 1973, featuring the world's first graphical user interface (GUI) with windows, icons, and a mouse for interaction, alongside Ethernet networking capabilities.^[1]^[2] It utilized a custom 16-bit microprocessor running at approximately 5.8 MHz, with 128 to 512 kilobytes of main memory organized as 16-bit words, and a high-resolution monochrome bitmapped display of 606 by 808 pixels that supported overlapping windows and WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) document editing.^[3] Storage was provided by 2.5-megabyte removable cartridge disk drives, allowing for easy data exchange, while input included a standard keyboard, a three-button mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart, and an optional five-key chording keypad for advanced commands.^[2]^[3] The Alto emerged from PARC's mission, established by Xerox in 1970, to explore office automation and advanced computing for non-expert users, including children and office workers, rather than traditional programmers.^[4] Development began in 1972 under Butler Lampson and Charles Thacker, building on earlier innovations like Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos" that demonstrated the mouse and windows.^[2] Approximately 2,000 units were produced between 1973 and 1981, primarily for internal research at PARC and select external demonstrations, without commercial sale due to high costs exceeding $10,000 per unit (equivalent to about $80,000 in 2023 dollars).^[2]^[5] The system's software, including the Bravo word processor—the first WYSIWYG editor—and the Smalltalk programming environment, was written in microcode and supported networked file sharing via Ethernet, a 2.94 Mbit/s local area network co-developed by Robert Metcalfe.^[1]^[3] Key innovations of the Alto included its bitmapped display for precise graphics rendering, which enabled intuitive visual computing, and its modular design that influenced subsequent systems like the Xerox Star workstation released in 1981.^[2] It also pioneered laser printing integration through the Dover printer, connected via Ethernet, allowing high-quality output of displayed content.^[1] The Alto's operating system, a single-user, single-tasking environment, emphasized user-friendliness with pop-up menus and drag-and-drop operations, marking a shift from command-line interfaces to visual metaphors that defined modern personal computing.^[3] Although never mass-produced, the Alto profoundly shaped the computing industry; a 1979 demonstration to Steve Jobs inspired Apple's Lisa and Macintosh, while its concepts influenced Microsoft Windows and other GUIs.^[4] Artifacts like an original Alto CPU are preserved at the Smithsonian Institution, underscoring its role as a foundational prototype in human-computer interaction.^[6] Today, emulations and source code releases by the Computer History Museum allow ongoing study of its legacy in distributed computing and user-centered design.^[5]

Overview

Design Principles

The Xerox Alto's design was profoundly influenced by Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos," which showcased an interactive system with a mouse, graphical display, and networked collaboration, inspiring PARC researchers to prioritize human augmentation through direct visual and manipulative interfaces over rigid command-line interactions.^[7] Complementing this, Alan Kay's 1972 Dynabook concept envisioned a portable personal computer for children and individuals, emphasizing graphical, multimedia environments that fostered creativity and learning via overlapping windows, icons, and intuitive tools, rather than shared mainframes.^[8] These inspirations shifted the Alto toward a philosophy of personal empowerment, where computing became an extension of human thought and expression. Conceived in 1972 through Butler Lampson's memo "Why Alto?", the project responded to the limitations of time-sharing systems like the SDS 940, which suffered from slow response times, resource contention, and inadequate support for interactive tasks despite enabling multi-user access.^[9] The core goals were to create an affordable desktop machine—targeted at around $10,000 per unit—for individual use, providing dedicated computing power, local storage, and high-bandwidth input/output to meet a single user's needs without reliance on centralized facilities.^[3] Networking via Ethernet enabled resource sharing, such as file servers and laser printers, while fostering experimentation in human-computer interaction to demonstrate the viability of distributed personal systems.^[10] Key principles included a bitmap graphics system for flexible, high-resolution displays approximating paper-like manipulation, using a frame buffer of about 0.5 million bits to render arbitrary text, lines, curves, and images at roughly 70 pixels per inch, freeing applications from fixed character sets.^[3] The bit-slice processor, built from TTL chips like the TI 74181 ALU and microprogrammed control store, allowed customizability through writable extensions, enabling rapid prototyping of instructions and emulations tailored to research needs, such as Lisp support or I/O handling.^[9] Integration of a three-button mouse facilitated direct manipulation, with position updates every 38 microseconds driving a programmable cursor for intuitive pointing and selection, embodying the shift to visible, reversible actions on screen objects.^[3]

Key Features

The Xerox Alto featured a high-resolution monochrome bitmap display with 606 horizontal by 808 vertical pixels, providing approximately 0.5 million bits per screen for rendering text, graphics, and interfaces. This display utilized a custom-adapted 875-line television monitor in portrait orientation, refreshed at 30 frames per second using a long-persistence white phosphor CRT, which allowed for precise control over individual pixels and supported advanced visual representations not possible with character-based terminals of the era.^[3]^[11] The bitmap approach enabled the development of graphical user interfaces, where on-screen elements directly corresponded to output formats. A key input device was the three-button mouse, which used optical encoding to track movement at about 100 points per inch, updating position coordinates every 38 microseconds for responsive pointing and gesturing. The mouse supported a programmable 16x16 pixel cursor bitmap for visual feedback, allowing users to interact with on-screen elements through button presses for actions like selection and menu invocation.^[3]^[12] Networking was integrated via Ethernet, operating at 2.94 megabits per second and capable of connecting up to 256 computers over distances up to 1 kilometer, facilitating file sharing, printing, and resource distribution among multiple Altos. The Ethernet controller handled packet transmission and reception as a dedicated task within the system.^[3]^[12] The Alto pioneered WYSIWYG editing capabilities, first realized in the Bravo text editor, where formatted text and layouts appeared on the display identically to the final printed output, leveraging the bitmap display for proportional fonts and precise positioning.^[5] Storage consisted of a 2.5 MB removable cartridge disk using the Diablo Model 31 drive, providing local persistent memory in a compact form factor.^[3] Physically, the Alto was designed as a compact desk-side unit, with the processor, memory, disk drive, and power supply housed in a small floor-standing cabinet approximately 23 inches wide, paired with a desktop-mounted keyboard, mouse, and monitor for ergonomic personal use.^[3]

Development

Conception

In late 1972, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Charles P. Thacker proposed the development of a personal computer system designed for individual use, featuring a bitmapped graphical display and a mouse for user interaction. This idea was initially discussed with Butler W. Lampson, a fellow researcher in PARC's Computer Science Laboratory, who supported the concept. Together, Thacker and Lampson approached Alan Kay, head of the Systems Science Laboratory, in September 1972, pitching the machine as an "Interim Dynabook" to support Kay's educational research initiatives. Kay approved the use of his lab's budget for the prototype, enabling Thacker to begin design work.^[13] The proposal emerged amid PARC's broader mandate for innovative research and development aimed at creating the "office of the future," influenced by contemporary advancements in computing, including ARPA-funded projects like Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS) at SRI International, which demonstrated interactive computing with displays and pointing devices. In December 1972, Lampson authored the internal memorandum "Why Alto?" to justify building 10 to 30 units of the system Thacker had designed. The memo emphasized the Alto's potential as a cost-effective alternative to minicomputers—estimated at around $10,500 per unit—while offering greater capabilities for personal tasks, such as document editing, graphics, and networked communication experiments. It highlighted applications in distributed computing, office automation, and education, positioning the Alto as a tool to advance multiple PARC research areas.^[14]^[15] Project approval came from Xerox corporate in early 1973, with the first prototype completed by spring at a cost of approximately $12,000, funded initially through Kay's resources. This greenlight occurred despite internal skepticism, including from some PARC managers who doubted the practicality of personal computing over shared minicomputers, and reservations from Xerox's office equipment divisions, which prioritized copier technology over experimental R&D. Thacker's wager to build the machine in just months underscored the project's ambitious yet feasible scope, setting the stage for its rapid prototyping.^[13]^[2]

Implementation and Team

The Xerox Alto was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Palo Alto, California, employing an iterative prototyping approach that allowed rapid refinement of the design based on ongoing testing and feedback.^[13] The core development team included Charles P. Thacker as hardware lead, who spearheaded the system's architecture and component design.^[13] Butler W. Lampson served as software lead, overseeing the creation of foundational elements like the operating system and early applications.^[16] Alan Kay contributed the overall vision, drawing from his Smalltalk research to emphasize personal computing and interactive interfaces, and he endorsed the project as an "Interim Dynabook."^[13] Key contributions also came from Robert F. Sproull, Ed M. McCreight, and David R. Boggs, who assisted with hardware implementation, microcode, and interfacing.^[17] The first prototype became operational in early 1973, marking the debut of the system at PARC in the spring of that year.^[13] Full production units followed by 1974, with approximately 2,000 systems ultimately built by 1981 to support research and internal applications.^[18] Engineering challenges centered on constructing a custom bit-slice processor using Texas Instruments 74181 ALU chips to achieve the required performance for graphics and interactivity.^[19] The team addressed complexities in integrating and debugging the display controller for bitmap graphics and the disk interfaces for reliable storage, iterating through hardware revisions to ensure stability.^[17]

Hardware

Processor and Memory

The Xerox Alto featured a 16-bit microprogrammed processor implemented using a bit-slice architecture, constructed from discrete TTL logic chips across five printed circuit boards. The central arithmetic logic unit (ALU) consisted of four Texas Instruments SN74S181 4-bit slice chips, enabling 16 arithmetic and 16 logical functions on 16-bit operands. The processor operated at a clock speed of 5.88 MHz (170 ns cycle time) and delivered an effective performance of approximately 0.4 million instructions per second.^[20]^[3]^[21] The processor supported multitasking through a shared micromachine design with 16 fixed-priority tasks, including an emulator for user programs, display refresh, and I/O operations such as disk control. It included 32 16-bit R registers for general use, eight 32-bit S registers for special functions like indexing, and a microprogram counter with associated RAM for control. This architecture allowed efficient interleaving of computation and I/O, though memory access bottlenecks limited overall throughput compared to dedicated systems.^[20]^[3] Main memory consisted of 128 KB (64K 16-bit words) of dynamic RAM in the base configuration, expandable up to 512 KB (256K words) in later Alto II models through additional memory banks. It utilized 16K-bit NMOS DRAM chips with an 850 ns access time, organized for error correction via a 6-bit Hamming code and overall parity for single-error correction and double-error detection. The system employed physical addressing with no virtual memory support, but allocated dedicated paged regions within main memory for the bitmap display buffer.^[20]^[3] The instruction set was custom-designed and implemented via microcode stored in 1K words of PROM, expandable to 4K words (1K PROM plus 3K RAM) for user-programmable extensions. Microinstructions were 32 bits wide, handling arithmetic, logical operations, I/O tasks, and display functions, while emulating a higher-level set optimized for languages like BCPL, with support for 16-bit data words and 16-bit addresses. This microcode approach facilitated rapid prototyping of emulators for other languages, such as Smalltalk and Lisp, directly within the processor.^[20]^[3] For persistent storage, the Alto used a single-platter removable cartridge disk drive from Diablo Systems Model 31, providing 2.5 MB capacity formatted into 4,872 sectors of 256 16-bit words each, with read/write heads and Manchester encoding for self-clocking data transfer. Later configurations supported up to two Model 31 drives or a Model 44 for doubled capacity, and optional high-performance interfaces like the CalComp Trident, which enabled 14 MB or 19 MB drives with faster seek times and transfer rates up to 9 Mbits per second.^[20]^[3]

Peripherals and Networking

The Xerox Alto featured a standard QWERTY keyboard with 64 keys, each producing a unique signal line for direct detection by the system without encoding delays, enabling responsive input for text entry and commands.^[22] Complementing the keyboard was a three-button mouse, an optical-electromechanical pointing device with approximately 100 counts per inch resolution, providing 10-bit coordinate precision (0-1023) mapped to the display's grid for precise cursor control. An optional five-key chording keyset provided advanced input for chorded commands.^[20]^[3] The display subsystem utilized a custom hardware controller to manage a 1024 × 1024 bit-mapped frame buffer, though the visible resolution on the monitor was effectively 606 pixels horizontally by 808 pixels vertically due to the raster scan and overscan margins.^[23] This bitmap was refreshed at 30 frames per second using an interlaced 60 Hz field rate, driven by a dedicated display processor that interpreted display lists to render graphics and text efficiently.^[22] The subsystem connected to a 17-inch cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor oriented in portrait mode, providing an 8.5 × 11 inch viewing area optimized for full-page document simulation at approximately 72 dots per inch.^[24] Additional peripherals included an audio output capability via an optional sound board, primarily used for generating simple beeps and tones to provide auditory feedback during operations.^[22] An optional printer interface supported connections to devices like the Diablo HyType or Versatec plotter, allowing output of bit-mapped content through memory-mapped control registers.^[22] Networking was enabled by an integrated EtherNet transceiver operating at 2.94 Mbps, supporting coaxial cable connections for local area networks spanning up to one kilometer and accommodating up to 256 nodes including other Altos and servers. The system employed the PARC Universal Packet (PUP) protocol suite for internetwork communication, which handled packet routing, delivery, and higher-level services in a connectionless manner, serving as a foundational influence on subsequent standards like TCP/IP.^[25] The processor managed I/O for these peripherals through dedicated memory-mapped interfaces and interrupt handling.^[22]

Software

Operating System

The Xerox Alto's operating system, designed by Butler Lampson and implemented with contributions from Gene McDaniel, Robert F. Sproull, and David R. Boggs, began as a basic microcode-based monitor without a full-fledged OS, evolving into a simple executive for resource management.^[26]^[27] This monitor, stored in the processor's 4K-word control store (initially 1K PROM and later expanded with RAM), handled essential functions including booting, vectored interrupt processing across 16 channels via the NIW register, and I/O operations through dedicated microcode tasks for devices like the disk, display, and Ethernet interface.^[3] The system supported multitasking with up to 16 fixed-priority tasks, enabling low-overhead switching every few microseconds using the NTASK register and priority encoder, where the emulator task ran at the lowest priority and I/O tasks (e.g., for display refresh) took precedence.^[3] Memory management employed fixed partitioning to allocate resources efficiently within the Alto's 64K to 256K 16-bit words of main memory, lacking virtual memory or hardware protection mechanisms.^[3] Approximately half of memory was dedicated to the display bitmap (the first 32K words for the 606x808 raster), with the remainder partitioned for code and data; larger programs utilized disk-based swapping to extend effective capacity, facilitated by bank registers for accessing extended memory banks.^[3] This approach, influenced by Stoy and Strachey's OS6 design, prioritized simplicity and direct hardware control over complex abstraction.^[26] The file system featured a flat structure on the 2.5 MB removable cartridge disks, where files consisted of non-contiguous pages identified by labels and allocation hints, without hierarchical directories to maintain operational efficiency.^[3] Local storage was supplemented by server-based shared access over Ethernet, using protocols like the Interim File Service for distributed file operations and redundancy, allowing multiple Altos to share resources without local disk dependency.^[3]^[26] The boot process initiated from ROM for basic initialization or directly from disk/Ethernet, loading the simple executive to enable task switching and load user programs like the Alto Executive for command-line interaction and file management.^[26]^[27] This executive provided a foundational layer for running applications, emphasizing rapid prototyping and user experimentation in the PARC environment.^[28]

Applications and User Interface

The Xerox Alto's graphical user interface (GUI) introduced pioneering elements that transformed user interaction with computers, including overlapping windows that allowed multiple applications to share the screen simultaneously, icons representing files and programs, and pull-down or pop-up menus for command selection.^[13]^[29] These features were driven by a three-button mouse, enabling precise pointing, selection, and dragging of objects across the bitmapped display, which rendered graphics at 606 by 808 pixels for smooth visual feedback.^[13]^[30] Among the Alto's notable applications, Bravo stood out as the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor, developed in 1974 by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, allowing users to edit text with real-time preview of formatting and layout as it would appear when printed.^[31]^[13] Draw, a vector graphics editor created by Patrick C. Baudelaire, enabled the creation of scalable line drawings and diagrams through mouse-based point selection and connection, supporting precise geometric constructions without pixel-level editing.^[26] Laurel, introduced around 1976, served as an innovative email client with a three-pane interface for viewing message headers, reading incoming mail, and composing replies, facilitating efficient management of electronic correspondence over the Ethernet network.^[32]^[33] Smalltalk, developed by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and Adele Goldberg starting in 1972 on the Alto, exerted significant influence through its object-oriented programming environment, featuring interactive demos that showcased dynamic code modification and execution within a live GUI.^[34] These demonstrations, such as turtle graphics simulations and user-created animations, illustrated Smalltalk's emphasis on message-passing between objects, enabling rapid prototyping and educational exploration of programming concepts in a visual, bitmapped space.^[34]^[13] The Alto's user interaction model embodied an early form of direct manipulation, where users could intuitively select, move, and resize graphical elements using the mouse, complemented by pop-up menus that appeared contextually for actions like cut, copy, or paste.^[29]^[13] Bitmapped fonts, designed at 72 DPI to match the display's resolution, provided scalable typography with support for multiple styles and sizes, ensuring legible and aesthetically pleasing text rendering across applications.^[35]^[36] This paradigm shifted computing from command-line inputs to visual, immediate feedback, laying foundational principles for modern interfaces.^[13]

Deployment and Influence

Internal Use at Xerox

Following its development, the Xerox Alto was deployed internally across Xerox facilities, with approximately 1,000 units in use at various Xerox laboratories, including the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and other corporate sites by the late 1970s.^[5] By summer 1979, nearly 1,000 Altos were in regular use, mainly by computer science researchers, engineers, and administrative staff at PARC, replacing shared computing systems with personal workstations.^[23] These systems supported daily tasks such as document preparation through bitmap graphics and WYSIWYG editing, scientific simulations, and early networking experiments over Ethernet, enabling collaborative workflows among over 100 users at PARC.^[23]^[37] Key projects at PARC leveraged the Alto for office automation prototypes, including the development of integrated applications for text editing, electronic mail, and file sharing that formed the basis of modern office systems.^[38] The Alto was notably integrated with early laser printing technologies prototyped at PARC, allowing high-resolution output from graphical documents to devices like modified photocopiers and precursors to the commercial Xerox 9700 printer introduced in 1977, which supported speeds up to 2 pages per second.^[10]^[39] This integration enabled what-you-see-is-what-you-get printing, a cornerstone of PARC's vision for automated offices, with Altos serving as controllers for networked printing experiments.^[38] Despite its innovations, the Alto's high cost—around $12,000 per unit for early prototypes—limited deployment to research and development environments within Xerox, preventing broader internal commercialization.^[2] Reliability challenges further constrained usage, including frequent issues with the removable cartridge disk drives, such as head positioning failures and data corruption from mechanical wear, as well as display phosphor decay requiring periodic recalibration on the bitmap CRT screens.^[40]^[19] The Alto's internal adoption fostered a cultural shift toward personal computing at PARC, where researchers engaged in hands-on training through self-built systems and shared documentation, promoting an ethos of individual empowerment over centralized mainframes.^[37] Daily use by more than 100 staff members encouraged iterative software development and experimentation, embedding concepts like graphical interfaces and networked collaboration into Xerox's R&D practices.^[23]

External Diffusion

In December 1979, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of engineers visited Xerox PARC, where they received demonstrations of the Alto's graphical user interface, mouse, and other innovations.^[41] This exposure profoundly influenced Apple's product development, directly inspiring the graphical user interface and related features in the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) computers.^[41] The Alto's technologies also drew interest from other industry leaders. In the early 1980s, Microsoft personnel engaged with PARC's work, with Bill Gates later acknowledging Xerox's pioneering role in graphical interfaces as a key influence on Windows development, beyond just Apple's adaptations.^[42] Additionally, Xerox facilitated external access through donations and limited sales; in 1978, the company donated 50 Alto systems to universities including Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Rochester to support academic research.^[33] Commercial dissemination remained constrained, with the Alto primarily distributed through Xerox's Interoffice Systems division for internal and select external use rather than broad market availability. Approximately 1,500 to 2,000 units were ultimately produced, with about half used non-commercially within Xerox and the rest provided to universities and partner research organizations.^[5] These efforts paved the way for commercial evolution within Xerox. In 1981, the company released the Xerox Star (8010 Information System), a workstation that incorporated many Alto concepts into a product aimed at office environments, marking the first GUI-based system offered for sale.^[43]

Legacy

Technological Impact

The Xerox Alto pioneered several foundational technologies that established personal computing as a viable paradigm, including the graphical user interface (GUI), the three-button mouse for direct manipulation, and Ethernet for local networking. These innovations, developed at Xerox PARC between 1972 and 1983, enabled intuitive interaction through overlapping windows, icons, and bitmap graphics, moving beyond command-line interfaces toward visual computing environments. The Alto's PARC Universal Packet (PUP) protocol stack further influenced the development of layered network architectures, contributing conceptual foundations to the OSI reference model by demonstrating end-to-end internetworking in a distributed personal computing context.^[44] The Alto demonstrated significant productivity gains in office environments by integrating networked workstations with tools like WYSIWYG word processing, electronic mail, and high-resolution printing, allowing users to collaborate and create documents more efficiently than with centralized mainframe systems. This shifted industry paradigms from expensive, shared mainframes toward affordable, individual desktop computers, fostering the growth of distributed computing and influencing corporate strategies to invest in personal workstations for knowledge workers.^[37] Specific legacies of the Alto include its bitmap display technology, which enabled pixel-level control for rendering graphics and text, becoming the standard for modern computer monitors and enabling scalable user interfaces. Its windowing system concepts, featuring resizable, overlapping windows managed by a desktop metaphor, directly inspired the window managers in Unix's X Window System (X11) and Apple's macOS, where elements like pull-down menus and drag-and-drop interactions trace roots to Alto demonstrations.^[45]^[13] The Alto's contributions were formally recognized with an IEEE Milestone in 2024 for establishing personal networked computing, and it is widely cited in computing histories as the first personal computer due to its complete integration of hardware, software, and user-centric design for individual use.^[46]

Preservation Efforts

As of the late 2010s, approximately 40 Xerox Alto systems were known to exist worldwide that were either operational or could be restored to working condition with sufficient effort.^[47] The Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California, maintains several of these units, including two that were meticulously restored starting in 2016 and completed by 2017 as part of the museum's Alto System Project.^[47] One notable restoration effort in 2016 involved a unit donated by Alan Kay to Y Combinator, where engineers addressed issues such as failing power supplies and incompatible processor boards to achieve full functionality.^[48] Similarly, the Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle restored two Alto systems that year, enabling public interaction with the hardware.^[49] To facilitate access to the Alto's software and operations without relying solely on aging hardware, emulation projects have played a crucial role in preservation. The ContrAlto emulator, developed by the Living Computers: Museum + Labs and released in 2016, provides a faithful software simulation of the Alto's hardware, allowing original disk images and applications to run on modern computers.^[49] This open-source tool, available on platforms like GitHub, supports research by replicating the system's bit-slice processor, memory, and peripherals with high accuracy.^[50] Complementary hardware-assisted recreations have used field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to emulate specific components, such as disk drives and Ethernet interfaces, aiding restorations by bypassing obsolete mechanical parts during testing and booting processes.^[51] Recent preservation activities have emphasized digitization and public engagement. In 2023, marking the 50th anniversary of the Alto's development, the CHM released a comprehensive digital archive of Xerox PARC materials from the 1970s to 1994, including Alto-related source code, documents, and filesystem images, made publicly accessible under non-commercial terms.^[13] This ongoing effort builds on earlier digitization of PARC's Alto filesystems, hosted by the CHM since the early 2010s, to preserve software artifacts for study.^[52] The CHM also hosted events that year, such as live demonstrations and talks on the Alto's innovations, further highlighting its historical significance.^[53] Preservation faces significant challenges due to the system's age and rarity. Sourcing obsolete components, such as custom CRT displays that have not been produced for over 15 years, remains difficult, often requiring scavenging from other units or fabricating replacements.^[47] Disk packs suffer from corrosion and oxidation after decades of storage, complicating data recovery and necessitating specialized cleaning or emulation for software access.^[47] Porting Alto software to emulators involves overcoming format incompatibilities and password protections on archived disks, though tools like ContrAlto have mitigated some of these issues for research purposes.^[54]

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Milestone-Proposal:Xerox Alto
Sep 19, 2019 · The Alto was the result of a joint effort by Ed McCreight, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs, who were attempting to ...Missing: rationale | Show results with:rationale
[34]
The Early History Of Smalltalk
This Smalltalk language (today labeled -71) was very influenced by FLEX, PLANNER, LOGO, META II, and my own derivatives from them. It was a kind of parser with ...
[35]
3.1.5 Xerox Alto, the Interim Dynabook and Smalltalk @mprove
As soon as the first Altos became operational in 1974 the bootstrapping power unfolds. The network of Alto computers became a perfect testbed for numerous ...
[36]
The Xerox Alto Font Design System | Visible Language
Aug 1, 2016 · It describes pioneering digital font software developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1974. Built for prototype personal workstations.
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Xerox Parc's Engineers on How They Invented the Future
(Many of the people at BCC were responsible for the design of the SDS 940, the computer on the strength of which Xerox bought Scientific Data Systems in 1968.).
[38]
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8509528
[39]
Xerox Invented Laser Printers
Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer in 1969 at Xerox, and the first commercial printer, the Xerox 9700, was introduced in 1977.Missing: Alto integration
[40]
A 1970s disk drive that wouldn't seek: getting our Xerox Alto running ...
Mar 31, 2018 · This blog post discusses our adventures debugging the Alto's Diablo hard drive and how we got it to work again.Missing: challenges | Show results with:challenges
[41]
Xerox PARC - CHM Revolution - Computer History Museum
Apple engineers, and CEO Steve Jobs, visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Alto's graphical interface and look “under the hood.” That visit ...Missing: sources | Show results with:sources
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Bill Gates credits Xerox, not Apple, for Windows - Axios
Dec 15, 2017 · Bill Gates said Monday that both companies really cribbed off industry pioneer Xerox, which developed the graphical interface.
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Xerox Star | computer workstation - Britannica
a computer workstation called the Xerox Star, which was introduced in 1981. Though the process was expensive, the Star (and its prototype predecessor, the Alto)
[44]
Standards Making and the OSI Reference Model
Technological evolutions and migrations to be studied will be: Xerox's Pup Protocol to XNS; DARPA's TCP Protocol to TCP/IP; IEEE Committee 802 standardizing ...
[45]
A History of the GUI - Ars Technica
May 4, 2005 · Windows could overlap other windows on the screen, and a selected window would move itself to the top of the "stack." The concept of "icons" was ...
[46]
The Xerox Alto: A Personal Retrospective - Computer History Museum
In this talk, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson describe a few of the applications and technologies the Alto enabled, as well as the exceptional working ...
[47]
A Conversation with Curator & Xerox Alto Restorer Al Kossow - CHM
Jul 18, 2017 · The conversation provides an in-depth window into the triumphs, challenges, and the work required to restore historical computers.
[48]
Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
### Summary of Y Combinator's Xerox Alto Restoration in 2016
[49]
Living Computer Museum restores Xerox Alto and debuts new ...
Aug 2, 2016 · Living Computer Museum restores Xerox Alto and debuts new emulator. Devin Coldewey. 11:58 AM PDT · August 2, 2016.
[50]
jdersch/Contralto2: Xerox Alto Emulator - GitHub
ContrAlto aspires to be a faithful emulation of the Xerox Alto series of pioneering graphical workstations developed at Xerox PARC starting in 1973.Missing: 2007 | Show results with:2007
[51]
Xerox Alto Restoration: Tools Development | by Aneddotica Magazine
Feb 19, 2017 · ... FPGA based disc tool that simulates the Alto writing and reading from disc, and a BeagleBone based Ethernet tool that simulates a pre ...
[52]
Access Xerox PARC Archive - Support - Computer History Museum
Read the following CHM Digital Archive Agreement and accept the terms and conditions at the bottom of the page to access the Xerox PARC Archive files.
[53]
From Alto to AI - CHM - Computer History Museum
May 4, 2023 · The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.-- Alan Kay · Alto Team Panel · Ai Research Panel<|separator|>
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https://www.righto.com/2018/01/xerox-alto-zero-day-cracking-disk.html