Xerox Alto: A Desktop Computer Before Its Time

Researchers at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, built the Alto in 1973 to explore what a personal computer could be. Each machine had a tall bitmapped screen, a keyboard, a three-button mouse and a removable disk cartridge. Ethernet cables joined the Altos to one another and to shared printers.

Programmers wrote text editors, drawing programs and the Smalltalk language for it. Documents on the screen looked like the pages that came out of the printer. About 2,000 were built, most for use inside Xerox and in universities. Xerox never sold the Alto as a product, but the ideas it tested helped shape the Apple Macintosh and later desktop computers. A single Alto cost many thousands of dollars to build, so the lab shared its machines rather than selling them to the public.