50 years later, we’re still living in the Xerox Alto’s world #VintageComputing @IEEESpectrum
By 1975, dozens of Xerox PARC’s researchers had personal Altos in their offices and used them daily. The large cabinet contained a CPU, memory, and a removable disk pack. On the desk are additional disk packs and the Alto’s vertical display, mouse, and keyboard.
The Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant’s newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It seems so uncannily familiar today for one reason: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.
The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user.
In contrast, the dominant mainframe at the time—IBM’s hugely popular System 360, heavily used by big organizations, and the Digital Equipment Corp.’s PDP-10, the darling of computing researchers—were nothing like the Alto. These and the other mainframes and minicomputers of the era were room-size affairs, almost always located somewhere away from the user and almost always under the control of someone else. The many simultaneous users of one such computer shared the system as a common resource.
Steve Jobs and a whole team from Apple toured PARC in 1979. The visit was arranged as a quid pro quo for allowing Xerox to invest in Jobs’s exciting new personal-computer company. Viewing Alto’s graphical user interface, Jobs had what he later described as an epiphany, one that reoriented his efforts at Apple forever after.
Xerox PARC’s researchers took the ideas implemented in the Alto and sent them out into the world, where they are reflected in software and hardware being used today.IEEE SPECTRUM
See a restoration video below and read more about Alto and the revolution it sparked in IEEE Spectrum.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython Comes to the ESP32-P4, Emulating Arm on RISC-V, and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
