Xerox Alto
Encyclopedia
The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use (though not as a home computer
), making it arguably what is now called a personal computer
. It was developed at Xerox PARC
in 1973. It was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor
and mouse-driven graphical user interface
(GUI).
It was not a commercial product, but several thousand units were built and were heavily used at PARC, other Xerox facilities, and at several universities for many years. The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers in the following decades, notably the Apple Macintosh
and the first Sun
workstations. It is now very rare and is a valuable collector's item.
, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart
at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker
. Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Clement Designlabs, whose team included Carl J. Clement, Ken Campbell (mechanical engineer), Terry West (industrial designer), and Fred Stengel. An initial run of 80 units was produced by Clement Designlabs, working with Doug Fairbairn at Xerox PARC, Tony Ciuffini and Rick Nevinger at Xerox El Segundo, who were responsible for installing the Alto’s electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.
Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California
. For his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, Charles P. Thacker was awarded the 2009 Turing Award
of the Association for Computing Machinery
on March 9, 2010. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize
was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto.
' 74181
chip, a ROM control store with a writable control store extension and had 128 (expandable to 512) kB
of main memory and a hard disk
that used a removable 2.5 MB
single-platter cartridge (Diablo Systems, a company Xerox later bought) similar to those used by the IBM 2310, all housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator
. The Alto's central processing unit
(CPU) was a very innovative microcode
d processor which used microcode for most of the I/O
functions rather than hardware. The microcode machine had 16 tasks, one of which executed the normal instruction set (which was rather like a Data General Nova
), with the others used for the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. As an example, the bitmap display controller was little more than a 16-bit
shift register
; microcode was used to fetch display refresh data from main memory and put it in the shift register.
Apart from an Ethernet
connection, the Alto's only common output device was a bi-level (black and white) cathode ray tube
(CRT) display
with a tilt-and-swivel base, mounted in "portrait" orientation rather than the more common "landscape" orientation. Its input devices were a custom detachable keyboard
, a three-button mouse, and an optional 5-key chord keyset. The last two items had been introduced by SRI's On-Line System; while the mouse was an instant success among Alto users, the chord keyset never became popular.
In the early mice, the buttons were three narrow bars, arranged top to bottom rather than side to side; they were named after their colors in the documentation. The motion was sensed by two wheels perpendicular to each other. These were soon replaced with ball-type mice, which were invented by Bill English. These were photo-mechanical mice — first using white light and then using IR to count the rotations of wheels inside the mouse.
The keyboard was interesting in that each key was represented as a separate bit in a set of registers. This characteristic was used to alter where the Alto would boot from. The keyboard registers were used as the address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems could be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release required more fingers than you could come up with. Nose boots were made obsolete by the "move2keys" program that shifted files on the disk so that a specified key sequence could be used.
Several other I/O devices were developed for the Alto, including a TV camera, the Hy-Type daisywheel printer and a parallel port, although these were quite rare. The Alto could also control external disk drives to act as a file server. This was a common application for the machine.
BCPL
, and later in Mesa, which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula
. The Alto keyboard lacked the underscore
key, which had been appropriated for the left-arrow character used in Mesa for the assignment operator. This feature of the Alto keyboard may have been the source for the CamelCase
style for compound identifier
s. Another feature of the Alto was that it was microcode-programmable by users.
The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics
model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced the concept of the bit block transfer operation, or BitBLT, as the fundamental programming interface to the display. Despite its small memory size, many innovative programs were written for the Alto, including:
There was no spreadsheet or database software.
in the sense that it was used by a single person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframe
s and other minicomputer
s of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others.
The Alto was never a commercial product, although several thousand were built. Universities, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, and the University of Rochester received donations of Altos including IFS file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines were the inspiration for the ETH Zürich Lilith
and Three Rivers Company PERQ
workstations, and the Stanford University Network
(SUN) workstation, which was eventually marketed by a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems
. The Apollo/Domain
workstation was heavily influenced by the Alto.
The White House information systems department acquired an Alto, and sought to lead Federal computer suppliers in its direction. The Executive Office of the President of the United States
(EOP) issued a request for proposal
for a computer system to replace the aging Office of Management and Budget (OMB) budget system, using Alto-like workstations, connected to an IBM-compatible mainframe. The request was eventually withdrawn because no mainframe producer could supply such a configuration.
In December 1979, Apple Computer
's co-founder Steve Jobs
visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG
, mouse-driven graphical user interface
provided by the Alto. He reportedly was not impressed by the first two, but was excited by the last one, and promptly integrated it, first into the Lisa
and then in the Macintosh
, attracting several key researchers to work in his company.
In 1980–1981, Xerox Altos were used by engineers at PARC and at the Xerox System Development Department to design the Xerox Star
workstations.
(SDS, later XDS) in the late 1960s, the firm was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs.
Before the advent of personal computers such as the Apple II models with Visicalc
drove a disbelieving IBM to put their name on the derivative IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC), the computer market was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared processing time of the central computer. So through the 1970s Xerox showed no interest in the work done at PARC. When Xerox finally entered the PC market with the Xerox 820
, they pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, a CP/M
-based machine with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse.
With the help of PARC researchers, Xerox eventually developed the Xerox Star
(and later the cost reduced Star; the 6085) office system, which included the Dandelion and Daybreak workstations. These machines, based on the 'Wildflower' architecture described in a paper by Butler Lampson, incorporated most of the Alto innovations, including the graphical user interface
with icons, windows, folders, Ethernet-based local networking, and network-based laser printer services.
Xerox only realized their mistake in the early 1980s, after Apple's Macintosh
revolutionized the PC market via its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface—both copied from the Alto. While the Xerox Star series was a relative commercial success, it came too late. The expensive Xerox workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that appeared in the wake of the first Macintosh, and Xerox eventually quit the workstation market for good.
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
), making it arguably what is now called a personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
. It was developed at Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
in 1973. It was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor
Desktop metaphor
The desktop metaphor is an interface metaphor which is a set of unifying concepts used by graphical user interfaces to help users more easily interact with the computer. The desktop metaphor treats the monitor of a computer as if it is the user's desktop, upon which objects such as documents and...
and mouse-driven graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
(GUI).
It was not a commercial product, but several thousand units were built and were heavily used at PARC, other Xerox facilities, and at several universities for many years. The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers in the following decades, notably the Apple Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
and the first Sun
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
workstations. It is now very rare and is a valuable collector's item.
History
The Alto was first conceptualized in 1972 in a memo written by Butler LampsonButler Lampson
Butler W. Lampson is a renowned computer scientist.After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1964, and his Ph.D...
, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker
Charles P. Thacker
Charles P. Thacker is an American pioneer computer designer.-Biography:Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.He received his B.S...
. Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Clement Designlabs, whose team included Carl J. Clement, Ken Campbell (mechanical engineer), Terry West (industrial designer), and Fred Stengel. An initial run of 80 units was produced by Clement Designlabs, working with Doug Fairbairn at Xerox PARC, Tony Ciuffini and Rick Nevinger at Xerox El Segundo, who were responsible for installing the Alto’s electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.
Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
in Mountain View, California
Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
. For his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, Charles P. Thacker was awarded the 2009 Turing Award
Turing Award
The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
of the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
on March 9, 2010. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize
Charles Stark Draper Prize
The National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Charles Stark Draper Prize, which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering" - the others being the Academy's Russ...
was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto.
Architecture
The Alto had a bit-slice processor based on the Texas InstrumentsTexas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
' 74181
74181
The 74181 is a bit slice arithmetic logic unit , implemented as a 7400 series TTL integrated circuit. The first complete ALU on a single chip, it was used as the arithmetic/logic core in the CPUs of many historically significant minicomputers and other devices.The 74181 represents an evolutionary...
chip, a ROM control store with a writable control store extension and had 128 (expandable to 512) kB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
of main memory and a hard disk
Hard disk
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...
that used a removable 2.5 MB
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
single-platter cartridge (Diablo Systems, a company Xerox later bought) similar to those used by the IBM 2310, all housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator
Refrigerator
A refrigerator is a common household appliance that consists of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from the inside of the fridge to its external environment so that the inside of the fridge is cooled to a temperature below the ambient temperature of the room...
. The Alto's central processing unit
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
(CPU) was a very innovative microcode
Microcode
Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions and/or data structures involved in the implementation of higher level machine code instructions in many computers and other processors; it resides in special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions into sequences of detailed...
d processor which used microcode for most of the I/O
Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
functions rather than hardware. The microcode machine had 16 tasks, one of which executed the normal instruction set (which was rather like a Data General Nova
Data General Nova
The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the American company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova was packaged into a single rack mount case and had enough power to do most simple computing tasks. The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world, and...
), with the others used for the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. As an example, the bitmap display controller was little more than a 16-bit
Bit
A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...
shift register
Shift register
In digital circuits, a shift register is a cascade of flip flops, sharing the same clock, which has the output of any one but the last flip-flop connected to the "data" input of the next one in the chain, resulting in a circuit that shifts by one position the one-dimensional "bit array" stored in...
; microcode was used to fetch display refresh data from main memory and put it in the shift register.
Apart from an Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
connection, the Alto's only common output device was a bi-level (black and white) cathode ray tube
Cathode ray tube
The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...
(CRT) display
Computer display
A monitor or display is an electronic visual display for computers. The monitor comprises the display device, circuitry, and an enclosure...
with a tilt-and-swivel base, mounted in "portrait" orientation rather than the more common "landscape" orientation. Its input devices were a custom detachable keyboard
Computer keyboard
In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...
, a three-button mouse, and an optional 5-key chord keyset. The last two items had been introduced by SRI's On-Line System; while the mouse was an instant success among Alto users, the chord keyset never became popular.
In the early mice, the buttons were three narrow bars, arranged top to bottom rather than side to side; they were named after their colors in the documentation. The motion was sensed by two wheels perpendicular to each other. These were soon replaced with ball-type mice, which were invented by Bill English. These were photo-mechanical mice — first using white light and then using IR to count the rotations of wheels inside the mouse.
The keyboard was interesting in that each key was represented as a separate bit in a set of registers. This characteristic was used to alter where the Alto would boot from. The keyboard registers were used as the address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems could be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release required more fingers than you could come up with. Nose boots were made obsolete by the "move2keys" program that shifted files on the disk so that a specified key sequence could be used.
Several other I/O devices were developed for the Alto, including a TV camera, the Hy-Type daisywheel printer and a parallel port, although these were quite rare. The Alto could also control external disk drives to act as a file server. This was a common application for the machine.
Software
Early software for the Alto was written in the programming languageProgramming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
BCPL
BCPL
BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...
, and later in Mesa, which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula
Modula
The Modula programming language is a descendent of the Pascal programming language. It was developed in Switzerland in the late 1970s by Niklaus Wirth, the same person who designed Pascal...
. The Alto keyboard lacked the underscore
Underscore
The underscore [ _ ] is a character that originally appeared on the typewriter and was primarily used to underline words...
key, which had been appropriated for the left-arrow character used in Mesa for the assignment operator. This feature of the Alto keyboard may have been the source for the CamelCase
CamelCase
CamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
style for compound identifier
Identifier
An identifier is a name that identifies either a unique object or a unique class of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical [countable] object , or physical [noncountable] substance...
s. Another feature of the Alto was that it was microcode-programmable by users.
The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics
Raster graphics
In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium...
model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced the concept of the bit block transfer operation, or BitBLT, as the fundamental programming interface to the display. Despite its small memory size, many innovative programs were written for the Alto, including:
- the first WYSIWYGWYSIWYGWYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
document preparation systems, BravoBravo (software)Bravo was the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. It provided multi-font capability using the bitmap displays on the Xerox Alto personal computer...
and GypsyGypsy (software)Gypsy was the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface to take advantage of those technologies to virtually eliminate modes. Its operation would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer...
; - the Laurel e-mailE-mailElectronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
tool, and its successor Hardy; - the Sil vector graphics editor, used mainly for logic circuits, printed circuit boardPrinted circuit boardA printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
, and other technical diagrams; - the Markup bitmapBitmapIn computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
editor (an early paint program); - the first WYSIWYGWYSIWYGWYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
integrated circuit editorIC layout editorAn Integrated circuit layout editor or IC layout editor is an electronic design automation software tool that allows a user to digitize the shapes and patterns that form an integrated circuit. Typically the view will include the components , metal routing tracks, vias and electrical pins...
based on the Conway and Mead paradigm; - the first versions of the SmalltalkSmalltalkSmalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
environment - InterlispInterlispInterlisp was a programming environment built around a version of the Lisp programming language. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts as BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the TENEX operating system...
- one of the first network-based multi-person computer games (Alto TrekAlto TrekAlto Trek is a computer game, developed by Gene Ball and Rick Rashid for the Xerox Alto while they were graduate students at the University of Rochester during the late 1970s. It's one of the first networked multiplayer games....
by Gene BallGene BallGene Ball is a computer science researcher and computer programmer.Ball obtained a bachelors degree from the University of Oklahoma, and attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, completing a masters degree and finishing his doctorate in 1982...
).
There was no spreadsheet or database software.
Diffusion and evolution
Technically, the Alto was a small minicomputer, but it could be considered a personal computerPersonal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
in the sense that it was used by a single person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
s and other minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others.
The Alto was never a commercial product, although several thousand were built. Universities, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, and the University of Rochester received donations of Altos including IFS file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines were the inspiration for the ETH Zürich Lilith
Lilith (computer)
Lilith is the name of custom built workstation using the AMD 2901 bit-slice processor by the group of Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. The project started in 1977 and by 1984 several hundred workstations were in use. It had a high resolution full page display, a mouse, a laser printer interface, and a...
and Three Rivers Company PERQ
PERQ
The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, was a pioneering workstation computer produced in the early 1980s....
workstations, and the Stanford University Network
Stanford University Network
The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University.-History:Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes...
(SUN) workstation, which was eventually marketed by a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
. The Apollo/Domain
Apollo/Domain
Apollo/Domain was a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computer from circa 1980 to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k family of processors, except for the DN10000, which had from one to four of Apollo's RISC processors, named PRISM.-Operating system:The...
workstation was heavily influenced by the Alto.
The White House information systems department acquired an Alto, and sought to lead Federal computer suppliers in its direction. The Executive Office of the President of the United States
Executive Office of the President of the United States
The Executive Office of the President consists of the immediate staff of the President of the United States, as well as multiple levels of support staff reporting to the President. The EOP is headed by the White House Chief of Staff, currently William M. Daley...
(EOP) issued a request for proposal
Request for Proposal
A request for proposal is issued at an early stage in a procurement process, where an invitation is presented for suppliers, often through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service. The RFP process brings structure to the procurement decision and is meant to...
for a computer system to replace the aging Office of Management and Budget (OMB) budget system, using Alto-like workstations, connected to an IBM-compatible mainframe. The request was eventually withdrawn because no mainframe producer could supply such a configuration.
In December 1979, Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's co-founder Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
, mouse-driven graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
provided by the Alto. He reportedly was not impressed by the first two, but was excited by the last one, and promptly integrated it, first into the Lisa
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....
and then in the Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
, attracting several key researchers to work in his company.
In 1980–1981, Xerox Altos were used by engineers at PARC and at the Xerox System Development Department to design the Xerox Star
Xerox Star
The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...
workstations.
Xerox and the Alto
Xerox itself was slow to realize the value of the technology that had been developed at PARC. After their unhappy experience with Scientific Data SystemsScientific Data Systems
Scientific Data Systems, or SDS, was an American computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky, a veteran of Packard Bell and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. SDS was an early adopter of integrated circuits in computer design and the first to employ silicon...
(SDS, later XDS) in the late 1960s, the firm was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs.
Before the advent of personal computers such as the Apple II models with Visicalc
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...
drove a disbelieving IBM to put their name on the derivative IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC), the computer market was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared processing time of the central computer. So through the 1970s Xerox showed no interest in the work done at PARC. When Xerox finally entered the PC market with the Xerox 820
Xerox 820
The Xerox 820 was an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer ran under the CP/M operating system and used floppy disk drives for mass storage...
, they pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, a CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
-based machine with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse.
With the help of PARC researchers, Xerox eventually developed the Xerox Star
Xerox Star
The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...
(and later the cost reduced Star; the 6085) office system, which included the Dandelion and Daybreak workstations. These machines, based on the 'Wildflower' architecture described in a paper by Butler Lampson, incorporated most of the Alto innovations, including the graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
with icons, windows, folders, Ethernet-based local networking, and network-based laser printer services.
Xerox only realized their mistake in the early 1980s, after Apple's Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
revolutionized the PC market via its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface—both copied from the Alto. While the Xerox Star series was a relative commercial success, it came too late. The expensive Xerox workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that appeared in the wake of the first Macintosh, and Xerox eventually quit the workstation market for good.
See also
- MousepadMousepadA mousepad or mouse mat is a surface for enhancing the usability of a computer mouse.-History:During a 1968 presentation by Douglas Engelbart marking the public debut of a mouse,...
- Alan KayAlan KayAlan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
- Adele GoldbergAdele Goldberg (computer scientist)Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in the 1970s.Goldberg began working at PARC in 1973, and...
- Apple LisaApple LisaThe Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....