Xerox Alto
An experimental personal workstation with a bitmapped display, mouse and Ethernet that defined the look of later personal computers.
The Alto was designed in 1972 and 1973 at Xerox PARC by a team that included Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker and Alan Kay. The first machine ran in April 1973. Each Alto had a portrait-format bitmapped display, a mouse, a keyboard and a removable disk cartridge, and it connected to others over Ethernet.
About 2,000 Altos were built for use inside Xerox and at universities. Xerox never sold it as a product. Programs on the Alto included the Bravo text editor, the Smalltalk environment and the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get documents. Steve Jobs visited PARC in December 1979 and saw demonstrations of this technology.
Why it matters
The Alto brought together the windows, icons, mouse and network that later reached the Apple Lisa, the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. It is a standard example of a research lab inventing a future that another company sold.
Key facts
- First operational in April 1973.
- About 2,000 machines were built.
- Included a mouse, bitmapped screen and Ethernet.
- Never sold commercially.
Sources
- Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray, et al. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd ed. Westview Press, 2013.
- Hiltzik, Michael. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. HarperBusiness, 1999.
- Thacker, Charles P., et al. "Alto: A Personal Computer." Xerox PARC Technical Report CSL-79-11, 1979.