Jobs himself said he was supposed to see 3 things in Xerox PARC but he was so blown away and amazed by Alto GUI that he even didnt bothered to see thoes 2 other things . Computer specialists from PARC were aware how important Alto is but Xerox chairman didnt undestood anything besides in 60th Xerox had lost lot money in computer industry. And that System just costed to much
Mārtiņš Markss I recall one of the other things was OOP, and the other was their networking capabilities - Xerox pioneered the first Ethernet. He saw the demos, but Alto GUI impressed him so much the other demos really paled in comparison and he didn’t really pay attention to them.
Absolutely ..Still seem to logically and visually sound... Not looking archaic at all ar any level.. that gives how well was their perspective to arrive at this.. PARC team were astounding bunch of smart people
I won't lie, this actually gives me goosebumps to watch! My jaw was on the floor watching this in 2020, let alone in 1973! The Alto was decades ahead of its time, genuinely unbelievable.
you don't know much about computer technology that's why. this technology was long available and very expensive that time, so mass production was beyond question. you cannot compare this machine to the cheap C64 & Amiga home computer "junk" of the 80's and 90's with much less computing power and memory.
@@Gute_Laune_Boyit's precisely because the tech had been around for awhile (five years) and Xerox was a big company that it was definitely possible for them to mass produce this. Instead, they let Steve Jobs steal their idea. 💡
This is from 1973?!?!!?!? How the... This looks better than Dos machines from the mid-80s in every conceivable way. Xerox really dropped the ball with this.
All of the innovations that we associate with a GUI came from this computer, directly...Xerox did drop the ball by letting both Gates and Jobs make explicit use of the technology (hence Macintosh and Windows).
The Xerox workstations were inspired by Doug Engelbart's famous "mother of all demos" at SRI in 1968, www.google.com/search?q=mother+of+all+demos But that platform was based on a centralized mainframe, driving maybe a dozen workstation displays and keyboards. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Steve jobs bought this idea to use for the macintosh. The creators at Xerox were totally unaware of how hight tech their creation was, so they blindly sold it to steve jobs who in later years changed the world (not to mention making billions) using this idea. If it weren't for this machine, we would still be coding basic or using MS DOS on our futuristic IBM PC's XD
@@retrodreams2428 I would say the creators were not unaware, but the upper management of Xerox was. Alan Kay was the visionary behind the Alto and a few other hero engineers skunkworked it during a few months during which their boss was sent away to work at the company headquarters. You should all read "dealers of lightning".
To be fair, you could run some similar software on top of DOS (e.g. DOS shell, graphics programs in DOS worked similarly). But, you're correct that Xerox dropped the ball. They had the game a decade before the others, and they didn't do anything with it!
The Alto was released in 1973 and is considered one of the first machines that could be called a personal computer (even though it wasn't intended for the home and costed tens of thousands of dollars per unit). There had been a couple of other desktop sized machines with a keyboard and monitor released prior to the Alto, but they weren't home machines either. The Alto differed from the previous machines in that it had a GUI, which was a unique idea at the time. The GUI concept had been developed in the 1960's by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford University (he also invented the mouse, video conferencing, point and click, hyperlinks, and other stuff). Engelbart gave a demonstration of all these ideas in 1968 (which is available on RUclips - it's a fascinating watch). Anyway, the Alto borrowed his GUI idea. Steve Jobs visited Xerox in 1979 and asked to steal the GUI concept for himself. He and Xerox reached an agreement. He would release the GUI with the Macintosh in 1984. Other manufacturers (Commodore, Tandy and IBM) would release products to compete with the GUI Macintosh shortly thereafter. And the rest is history.
The Alto system is 50 years old this year. Total domination of the entire planet's computing paradigm in half a century. It may have been one of the biggest blunders in business history for Xerox, but the idea underlying it...the idea conquered the world.
Wow. It's amazing that these types of computers existed in 1972!! Without this computer, there would be no Mac, Windows, or iPhone. I highly respect Xerox for their innovation. If you look at the first Mac, it's quite similar to the Xerox Alto.
That's how you know the world around us has alot of possibilities, but childish elitist competition 9 times out of 10 keeps most people like Steve Wozniak from ever having voice to put such ideas across, unless there is the other Steve the leader / crazy / visionary Jobs to bring it out.
In 2021 you still have to reboot your system after certain changes you make, this modified the GUI and didn't need a restart. Impressive and so ahead of its time.
Around 1975-76 I worked as a photographer for the Ralph M. Parsons company in Pasadena, California. I attended an off-site demonstration of one of these. I distinctly remember the vertical CRT with black text on a white screen. I only saw the word processor demonstrated, and I believe there was a laser printer attached. It was all fitted into a large desk. Very impressive.
I am mind blown by the section about SmartTalk from 14:00. What!! 1973??! This was so so so ahead of its time. The programming environment back then, with the menu system allowing the objects to be inspected, is just ridiculously advanced compared to what I was using in the 1980s much later with Standard C, etc. Even the GUI.. the scrollbars, window resizing is already there, almost 10 years before the Xerox Star (and then Macintosh which essentially repeated what was already done with Xerox Star). This is all a testament to state funded research being execedingly more innovative than private research. The hard difficult *risky and most innovative* work is done by the state, and then the easy *incremental* work handed over to the private sector for the profits. Actually if you take everything in your mobile phone (the V.N. basic chip architecture, the silicon chip, the GSP, the modern languages (being essentially variations of Algol-69), the internet protocols, transistors, screen technology.. no matter which component you look at, it came out of the state sector (either directly, or a private company with the State as the customer such as with Sun and Xerox) when the component was invented.
@@landonbobbett2301 absolutely. If we think Alto and Smalltalk were fantastic in 1973, go back another 5 years and watch the modern mouse move an early GUI, on-line system. Onya Doug Englebart.
Khartikeyen Satheraman. I don’t think so. Apple has been inspired by this snd brought the Lisa to market but being expensive it didn’t catch on. Also the Mac didn’t really. Price matters.
also the only UI innovation that really happened after the basic windowing scheme is the touch UI of modern smartphones. what made the smartphones feasible was advances in semiconductor fabrication and they couldn't really have sped up Moore's law, so it happened pretty much as fast as it could've.. imo where the ball was dropped was around 1st century when they didn't continue developing the first steam turbine and humanity lost ~1500 years of industrial development.
It's amazing how the Alto's paint program from 1973 has more advanced features than Windows 10's Paint. Just imagine how much more advanced computer technology would be today if the bigwigs at Xerox took this seriously. Unfortunately they didn't share the vision that the PARC team had and thought personal computers had no future.
But they had no personal computer future for GUIs in that timeframe due to the incredibly expensive cost to build and maintain these. Moore's law was at the bottom end of the curve and would take a decade to finally arrive at prices high brow white collar professionals were willing to pay for at home use.
That's how you know the world around us has alot of possibilities, but childish elitist competition 9 times out of 10 keeps most people like Steve Wozniak from ever having voice to put such ideas across, unless there is the other Steve the leader / crazy / visionary Jobs to bring it out.
I will never believe how Xerox couldn't see the application of this technology. I understand watching this just how futuristic it must've seemed at that time but it was real... They had it in front of them. So the futuristic aspect should've made them even more excited to realize how large of a leap forward this was for the computer. Thank you for sharing this.
Despite the cost, I can imagine Xerox would have sold enough Altos to big offices & government to fund the second generation. It would have been a very different computer world had they been given support.
One of the main hurdles was that the Executives to which it was marketed initially could not relate. It was their secretaries/administrative aides which took to the concept almost immediately.
Had Xerox made some refinements and started mass-producing the Alto for the office market, Xerox would have made *GOBS* of money! Many of the decision-makers at Xerox are probably *STILL* kicking themselves! Microsoft and Apple probably wouldn't have been the big players that they are now.
But Xerox actually did! They commercialized the Star workstation. And they completely missed the price point by an order of magnitude. Then the Apple Lisa made a similar mistake, which Jobs was very aware of (and fighting against) even before they tried to commercialize it. Only when Jobs overtook the Macintosh program and figured out how to do it for $2,000 and with all the right hardware, packaging, industrial design, interface progress and other refinements did it become a runaway success. And still then, only on second try, with the 512k memory machine.
Time was right, but Apple did it better. And Xerox made a ton of money on the laser printer, so kudos to them, they should not feel too bad. That's what happens with research, doesn't always benefits who pays for it. It did benefit the world. I'll take that any day.
Many companies that are great at R&D are bad at commercializing their creations. IBM created a 2000 ppi monitor back in the early 2000s (might've been late 90s... I know it was on Slashdot when it got announced) and we're still miles away from that kind of pixel density in anything we can buy or use.
I know that a Xerox 6085I (XPIW) with a 4045 Model 50 300dpi laser printer was around $30,000 in 1985. I think the 8010 was around 15-20K. The 8010 was networked only, whereas the 6085 was available as a stand alone workstation. Colleges and Universities received a large price break on the purchases of Xerox Documenter's etc. There were a couple pieces of software which Xerox missed the boat on. One was a Spreadsheet program. I cannot remember what the other one was. The first network laser printer was a modified Xerox 7000 copier. Later on came the 1700 Network printer (I think), then the 2700, followed by the 3700.
Truly excellent work to get this up and working - its just amazing how far ahead Xerox were then, shame their Management at the time couldn't of handled things better, as they could have been the major name in computing instead of just known for producing photocopiers today . . .
It was a bit more than that. For the personal computer user, for instance a Star 8010 or 6085 price wise was unobtainable by the average computer user. A 6085 model 1 with a 4045 Model 50 Laser printer was around $30,000 in 1985. For education though the price was much lower.
I was lucky enough to play with them at PARC during development, when I was maybe 10; my friend's dad worked there and we'd go in with him on weekends. Just as how kids today are far better at using smartphones than adults, we took to the Alto instantly, with no preconceived notions of command line or whatever - we just grabbed the mouse and were off. I distinctly remember those discs seen on the table at 19:00 and how people were so excited about removable storage.
Beautiful job guys!! I'm so happy you got this restored and working so well. This was an amazing machine, LIGHT years ahead of its time, especially in the office environment. It would have been a different world today if Xerox cared more about their computer division. Ken, you're an Alto Master, and we're thankful that you've shared your knowledge of this system.
OMG! This is the same amazing insanity as a relay computer running x86 architecture software like Microsoft Edge!! This is so cool you guys were able to restore it! My faith in humankind has been restored ☺️👏👏🕊️ Bravo! When I grow up mabye I too like the great Robert Noyce can design a quantum computer 30yrs ahead of it's time. This will be my inspiration 😎💻💾
It's the high resolution that blows me away. And ofcourse the class definitions in smalltalk that is practically still standard today. What's google gonna log as user agent?😃
@@111danish111 600x800 = 800x600 if you flip the screen into landscape mode.... that was a screen resolution used in the 90's all the way up to 2002 when pentium 2 and 3 introduced fast enough 1024x768 graphic cards. Xerox was sitting on a gold mine.
Joël Pichette Nope. Nobody could afford this stuff really, and by the time Mac came out in 1984, and Amiga in 1985, this one was instantly made obsolete. Even in the late 70s (78-79) these monster hard drives were long in the tooth, and an 8” floppy could hold 1MB of data with FM encoding, or 3MB had they splurged to implement PRML in the controller.
I think because it's cool to see where things started. Sort of like seeing pictures of your parents at your age. When you look at computers now you don't expect them to have so much in common with the past.
One thing I can see that maybe inspired Steve Jobs is that it has white interface and black letters/lines - not like most at that time where background was dark and lines and letters white. It has more open feeling - more light. And of course mouse and cursor is big thing. You can select with mouse very quickly another folder - no need to taping up or down button 10 times. And finally I have to admit it has really good design - it has that sci-fi feeling to it - white shell, black frame, oddly pleasing vertical screen with cool white glow and sharp image. Very minimalistic and functional at the same time. Only thing - not very intuitive for todays standards 50y later :). But you made great job restoring it. Really beautiful machine.
15:25 Apparently a rite of passage for any Smalltalk user was when they made so many changes to their system image that it would not boot any more, and they had to reinitialize it from scratch. ;)
Outstanding work guys. Always been interested in the Alto, you've done a great job getting this machine running and thank you for posting these videos for everyone to watch.
Xerox PARC must have been an awesome place to work at back then. People invented their own stuff to work on next inventions. The team was cerafully selected from the brightest minds of that era. I read a great book about it - "Dealers Of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik.
it has been really great watching your Alto restoration videos and now this video showing the software examples is fantastic also.. thanks for taking the time to make them so we can all enjoy seeing this historic computer..
Priceless! Thankyou all so much for restoring and maintaining that machine. As a kid I read about the Alto and I am super happy to see that great demo.
This thing is the real grandfather of the PC! It's just pure awesome hardcore hardware porn at it's finest! You insert a disk, then it sucks the air out and then you can *feel* every operation this machine does on the disk. :D And all the modern features it has ... in 1973. Unbelievable! Xerox should be ruling the IT world, if only their management would have realized what they got there.
Incredible. I’ve known about the Alto since the 90s but this is my first time seeing it in action... breathtaking!!! The way the draw program renders curves is beautiful. Thank you for an amazing demo!!!
Marc, thank you to you and your friends there for sharing this series about the restoration of your Alto. Great job getting that historic computer system up and running again.
They did. But their final product (the Xerox Star) was far inferior to Apple’s genius second implementation (the Macintosh, also coming after the failed Lisa), was unsuccessful in the marketplace and quickly forgotten.
How so? Inflation adjusted this was a 100k computer because of the complex components inside. Took a decade for Moore's law to run its course in miniaturizing chips to make this into a consumer purchase zone. For example, would anyone buy a 100k smartphone today in droves if it read brainwaves so you have an automatic human interface?
Now I see a computer I would have missed an opportunity to learn to use. I have done keypunch keyboarding on key-to-disk terminals and have not accomplished anything else than working overtime. As a staunch typist, I would have loved to work on the Xerox Alto. Now I am working on a Dell microcomputer with Microsoft Windows 10 Professional, and I do not unhappily miss routine work.
I'm upside down. You have to see it to believe it. It is to see a computer so perfected for that time. No doubt Steve Job found these ideas from the Xerox Alto. The definition of the screen is probably what surprises me the most 😃
Hard to imagine that Xerox never actually tried to market the Alto to the masses in the 70s’ probably at affordable prices. Otherwise, the names Microsoft and Apple will likely be unheard of. The product and the technology are so far ahead of its time.
how? building one cost more than building a house. and what would the masses have done with one. I remember 80s buzz around "personal computers", newspapers were speculating about what could you do with one.. common thing suggested was to organize your cookbook recipes. I mean unless you were running a business or were some kind of scientist a computer was pretty useless (of course playing games was for kids but computer is too expensive of a toy). it was actually pretty similar when world-wide web came around, it was awesome but what do you use it for? and yep "to look up recipes" was suggested. it took a long time to build the infrastructure between real world and online world before PCs became useful household items.
In the 70s there was no mass market for it, and it was impossible to build a computer like this at affordable prices. Components were just too expensive. Xerox might have been able to be first, but Apple implemented the ideas much better and Microsoft was extremely successful at making brilliant business deals despite having an inferior product so Xerox would have needed to step up their game both when it came to the product side, and the business side in order to be more successful. It is rarely the company that is "first" who succeeds.
@@dm8579 I don’t quite understand. If there is no market, create one like the narcotics business. Once people become hooked, the market will start to take shape. Also, affordable prices always depend on the economy itself. Perhaps prices in America are not so good, well offshore to China, Russia or some 3rd world countries for cheap labour and raw materials. Very much a matter of management’s acumen rather than actions.
@@davidchang5862 Yes labour is cheap in other parts of the world, but the problem was that chips and memory were very expensive at the time, like new technology always is. Much was also development costs. They could have cut the price a little but not as much as would be needed. And it is not easy to create a market just like that. It takes time.
12:30 The windows may overlap, but I believe the updates don’t handle that correctly. When Steve Jobs took his crew around, they never noticed that limitation. Bill Atkinson in particular, believed they had solved that problem. But they hadn’t: when he came up with his region architecture for QuickDraw, that was the first actual efficient solution to the problem of updating nonrectangular areas of the screen.
Fantastic demo! All the hard work you put into getting this system going again really shows. I wish I could have made VCF West to see it in person! I should go through some of the functions on my Lisa in a similar in depth manor... you can see how some things are related, but they are really quite different systems.
Thanks for sharing this series. So much amazing tech, 20 years before its time. Xerox could have been Apple and Microsoft (and perhaps Cisco) combined!
Wow. I never knew Xerox was so advanced in their research. This really shows how Apple and Microsoft ripped them off with GUI and mouse design. Very informative video and history lesson !!
Это просто поразительная машина для своего времени. Вся эта система как будто создана человеком из будущего видевшим современные компьютерные системы, но ограниченным технологиями тех лет.
I remember seeing a commercial on TV briefly showing the Xerox Alto, about 1972-3 or so. I thought to myself that this was the future, and it was! I believed it odd that Xerox would show a TV commercial for something it didn't mass-produce and sell as a business machine. Xerox shelved it--Steve Jobs and Bill Gates picked it up and the rest is history!
I miss the portrait orientation monitors of early computing. Found an abandoned Xerox computer with 8" floppies and a big old amber monitor in portrait orientation. When we got it back to my place I was able to boot it, but couldn't get it to do much besides list contents of the disk. It had a really cool keyboard with a circular trackpad on it. So I was convinced it must have a GUI somewhere.
Excelente trabajo de restauración, amigos les hago una pregunta: porque no trabajan también blanqueando los plásticos del monitor, mouse, unidades de disco etc? creo que sería lo que le devolvería también el toque original, es una sugerencia. Saludos desde Argentina y felicitaciones a todo el equipo.
The precursor to the precursor to the Mac! (Apple Lisa). Or was it the Star? ... in any case, this kind of demo is what blew Steve Jobs away and got him all fired up to create the prototype that would evolve into the Mac. An appliance computer for the masses! (I bought a 128K Mac in April 1984 for $4000, including an external 400K floppy disk drive and an ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Woohoo! Desktop Publishing here we come... ). So goes the lore anyway ...
Would be insane if you could get a browser stack running on that system. Would have to cheat with some modern hardware to network interface (which probably would have magnitudes more of processing power), but still, it would be really neat.
Its cool how x11 mouse commands were the same as alto. I really want to see blit are you guys going to ever do a demo of blit terminals? Draw is very intuitive.. text edit is a lot like laytex
Xerox dropped the ball big time when they failed to realize what they had. I'll never understand their decision not to pursue the Alto project, after having spent a lot of money funding Xerox PARC ? Lucky for us that Steve Jobs picked it up, refined it, and ran with it, so we can have Macs today...and Windows thanks to Bill Gates who simply copied Apple, who copied Xerox. ;-) Great work on making the Alto system work again ! A very important piece of computer history.
This is a common misconception. Xerox *did* productize the Alto technology in the high-end Star workstations. But it was a closed system at a staggeringly high price point, and it did not succeed commercially. However, the laser printing technology did succeed very well within Xerox.
Yes indeed. I had forgotten about the Star System commercial venture. What amazes me is that the Alto doesn't use any microprocessors to do all that it does, which is sometimes rather computing intensive ! Anyway, this restoration project is a colossal piece of work by all of you guys. My hat's off to the team !
Thanks! It goes on to show that a good commercial product needs much more than just insanely great technology. Even more sadly, that some folks get to successfully commercialize some rather appalling technology. Particularly in the computer business. Don't get me started with the M... company ;-)
@@CuriousMarcdid you ever want to consider putting this desktop at a museum? If it’s gone cause of ever getting broken, software not working, anything that affects it, did you ever want to make sure that it’s condition will always remain the best that it is today by giving it to a museum that can place a glass box around it?
1973 - Elvis and Lennon are still singing, Nixon is still a president and there was a place on the Earth where you could just go and use PC with a GUI indistinguishable from the ones of Windows or Mac in 2020.
@@snooks5607 well, yep, as we can see - some simple people are just very easy to be impressed with fancy shadows and transparent effects to believe that these are some cutting edge technology.
I probably either subliminally caught this, or maybe I read it somewhere, but isn’t the Alto literally taken from the town in central California, Palo Alto? I guess it’s got to be, since that’s where the research center is. Always entertaining and educational. THANKS AGAIN!!
The Smalltalk is actually like Atom IDE. You can also program its look and feel through cascading stylesheets. Vertical monitors are also favoured by some programmers nowadays. Probably Windows Pinball is a game nod to this machine.
I’ve genuinely never seen before something so ridiculously ahead of its time like the Alto, it still impresses me
Jobs himself said he was supposed to see 3 things in Xerox PARC but he was so blown away and amazed by Alto GUI that he even didnt bothered to see thoes 2 other things . Computer specialists from PARC were aware how important Alto is but Xerox chairman didnt undestood anything besides in 60th Xerox had lost lot money in computer industry. And that System just costed to much
@@mikcnmvedmsfonoteka I wonder if the other two things were laser printing and optical storage.
Mārtiņš Markss I recall one of the other things was OOP, and the other was their networking capabilities - Xerox pioneered the first Ethernet. He saw the demos, but Alto GUI impressed him so much the other demos really paled in comparison and he didn’t really pay attention to them.
Absolutely ..Still seem to logically and visually sound... Not looking archaic at all ar any level.. that gives how well was their perspective to arrive at this.. PARC team were astounding bunch of smart people
@@usgbitJS object oriented programming being the foundation for all ... Absolutely
I won't lie, this actually gives me goosebumps to watch! My jaw was on the floor watching this in 2020, let alone in 1973! The Alto was decades ahead of its time, genuinely unbelievable.
I can’t believe this thing was made in 1973 its crazy how advanced it was.
you don't know much about computer technology that's why. this technology was long available and very expensive that time, so mass production was beyond question. you cannot compare this machine to the cheap C64 & Amiga home computer "junk" of the 80's and 90's with much less computing power and memory.
@@Gute_Laune_Boyit's precisely because the tech had been around for awhile (five years) and Xerox was a big company that it was definitely possible for them to mass produce this. Instead, they let Steve Jobs steal their idea. 💡
@@Gute_Laune_Boy Moore’s Law was already in effect in 1984.
This is from 1973?!?!!?!? How the...
This looks better than Dos machines from the mid-80s in every conceivable way. Xerox really dropped the ball with this.
All of the innovations that we associate with a GUI came from this computer, directly...Xerox did drop the ball by letting both Gates and Jobs make explicit use of the technology (hence Macintosh and Windows).
The Xerox workstations were inspired by Doug Engelbart's famous "mother of all demos" at SRI in 1968,
www.google.com/search?q=mother+of+all+demos
But that platform was based on a centralized mainframe, driving maybe a dozen workstation displays and keyboards.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Steve jobs bought this idea to use for the macintosh. The creators at Xerox were totally unaware of how hight tech their creation was, so they blindly sold it to steve jobs who in later years changed the world (not to mention making billions) using this idea. If it weren't for this machine, we would still be coding basic or using MS DOS on our futuristic IBM PC's XD
@@retrodreams2428 I would say the creators were not unaware, but the upper management of Xerox was. Alan Kay was the visionary behind the Alto and a few other hero engineers skunkworked it during a few months during which their boss was sent away to work at the company headquarters. You should all read "dealers of lightning".
To be fair, you could run some similar software on top of DOS (e.g. DOS shell, graphics programs in DOS worked similarly). But, you're correct that Xerox dropped the ball. They had the game a decade before the others, and they didn't do anything with it!
The Alto was released in 1973 and is considered one of the first machines that could be called a personal computer (even though it wasn't intended for the home and costed tens of thousands of dollars per unit). There had been a couple of other desktop sized machines with a keyboard and monitor released prior to the Alto, but they weren't home machines either.
The Alto differed from the previous machines in that it had a GUI, which was a unique idea at the time. The GUI concept had been developed in the 1960's by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford University (he also invented the mouse, video conferencing, point and click, hyperlinks, and other stuff). Engelbart gave a demonstration of all these ideas in 1968 (which is available on RUclips - it's a fascinating watch). Anyway, the Alto borrowed his GUI idea.
Steve Jobs visited Xerox in 1979 and asked to steal the GUI concept for himself. He and Xerox reached an agreement. He would release the GUI with the Macintosh in 1984. Other manufacturers (Commodore, Tandy and IBM) would release products to compete with the GUI Macintosh shortly thereafter. And the rest is history.
The Alto system is 50 years old this year. Total domination of the entire planet's computing paradigm in half a century. It may have been one of the biggest blunders in business history for Xerox, but the idea underlying it...the idea conquered the world.
Wow. It's amazing that these types of computers existed in 1972!! Without this computer, there would be no Mac, Windows, or iPhone. I highly respect Xerox for their innovation. If you look at the first Mac, it's quite similar to the Xerox Alto.
That's how you know the world around us has alot of possibilities, but childish elitist competition 9 times out of 10 keeps most people like Steve Wozniak from ever having voice to put such ideas across, unless there is the other Steve the leader / crazy / visionary Jobs to bring it out.
In 2021 you still have to reboot your system after certain changes you make, this modified the GUI and didn't need a restart. Impressive and so ahead of its time.
Around 1975-76 I worked as a photographer for the Ralph M. Parsons company in Pasadena, California. I attended an off-site demonstration of one of these. I distinctly remember the vertical CRT with black text on a white screen. I only saw the word processor demonstrated, and I believe there was a laser printer attached. It was all fitted into a large desk. Very impressive.
You gotta be shocked that moment :)
👍👍
I am mind blown by the section about SmartTalk from 14:00. What!! 1973??! This was so so so ahead of its time. The programming environment back then, with the menu system allowing the objects to be inspected, is just ridiculously advanced compared to what I was using in the 1980s much later with Standard C, etc. Even the GUI.. the scrollbars, window resizing is already there, almost 10 years before the Xerox Star (and then Macintosh which essentially repeated what was already done with Xerox Star). This is all a testament to state funded research being execedingly more innovative than private research. The hard difficult *risky and most innovative* work is done by the state, and then the easy *incremental* work handed over to the private sector for the profits. Actually if you take everything in your mobile phone (the V.N. basic chip architecture, the silicon chip, the GSP, the modern languages (being essentially variations of Algol-69), the internet protocols, transistors, screen technology.. no matter which component you look at, it came out of the state sector (either directly, or a private company with the State as the customer such as with Sun and Xerox) when the component was invented.
It always amazes me how efficient the earlier computers were. Nice to see the Alto got restored and working flawlessly.
It's amazing this is being done on a computer from 1973. Not even mspaint has some of the functions in that draw application.
MSPaint was never meant to be any good. That is why you have Corel Draw, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc etc..
Ares Apollo irrelevant and untrue
@@zerazara exactly
Nls in 1968 was cool too!
@@landonbobbett2301 absolutely. If we think Alto and Smalltalk were fantastic in 1973, go back another 5 years and watch the modern mouse move an early GUI, on-line system. Onya Doug Englebart.
Imagine how much further technology may have come had this been actually sold in the 70’s
the technology would be 10 years ahead now.Considering desktop computers were introduced to the consumer market in the mid-80s
Khartikeyen Satheraman. I don’t think so. Apple has been inspired by this snd brought the Lisa to market but being expensive it didn’t catch on. Also the Mac didn’t really. Price matters.
This was totally impractical to sell to the consumer in its time.
It inspired Apple, Atari, Amiga and Windows so it left it's marks in computer history.
also the only UI innovation that really happened after the basic windowing scheme is the touch UI of modern smartphones. what made the smartphones feasible was advances in semiconductor fabrication and they couldn't really have sped up Moore's law, so it happened pretty much as fast as it could've.. imo where the ball was dropped was around 1st century when they didn't continue developing the first steam turbine and humanity lost ~1500 years of industrial development.
It's amazing how the Alto's paint program from 1973 has more advanced features than Windows 10's Paint.
Just imagine how much more advanced computer technology would be today if the bigwigs at Xerox took this seriously. Unfortunately they didn't share the vision that the PARC team had and thought personal computers had no future.
lol yeah
But they had no personal computer future for GUIs in that timeframe due to the incredibly expensive cost to build and maintain these. Moore's law was at the bottom end of the curve and would take a decade to finally arrive at prices high brow white collar professionals were willing to pay for at home use.
That's how you know the world around us has alot of possibilities, but childish elitist competition 9 times out of 10 keeps most people like Steve Wozniak from ever having voice to put such ideas across, unless there is the other Steve the leader / crazy / visionary Jobs to bring it out.
I will never believe how Xerox couldn't see the application of this technology. I understand watching this just how futuristic it must've seemed at that time but it was real... They had it in front of them. So the futuristic aspect should've made them even more excited to realize how large of a leap forward this was for the computer.
Thank you for sharing this.
Despite the cost, I can imagine Xerox would have sold enough Altos to big offices & government to fund the second generation. It would have been a very different computer world had they been given support.
One of the main hurdles was that the Executives to which it was marketed initially could not relate. It was their secretaries/administrative aides which took to the concept almost immediately.
525Lines that honestly blows my mind to even think about.
The internet could have appeared ten years earlier
@@ScoobieDoobieDoob it did, it was called ARPANET (internet).
@@tomservo5007 I know about ARPANET, I was more so speaking of the internet we all know and love. The world wide web.
Had Xerox made some refinements and started mass-producing the Alto for the office market, Xerox would have made *GOBS* of money! Many of the decision-makers at Xerox are probably *STILL* kicking themselves! Microsoft and Apple probably wouldn't have been the big players that they are now.
But Xerox actually did! They commercialized the Star workstation. And they completely missed the price point by an order of magnitude. Then the Apple Lisa made a similar mistake, which Jobs was very aware of (and fighting against) even before they tried to commercialize it. Only when Jobs overtook the Macintosh program and figured out how to do it for $2,000 and with all the right hardware, packaging, industrial design, interface progress and other refinements did it become a runaway success. And still then, only on second try, with the 512k memory machine.
maybe it also was too far ahead of its time... businesses don't always just take the 'best' while ignoring all other factors
Time was right, but Apple did it better. And Xerox made a ton of money on the laser printer, so kudos to them, they should not feel too bad. That's what happens with research, doesn't always benefits who pays for it. It did benefit the world. I'll take that any day.
Many companies that are great at R&D are bad at commercializing their creations. IBM created a 2000 ppi monitor back in the early 2000s (might've been late 90s... I know it was on Slashdot when it got announced) and we're still miles away from that kind of pixel density in anything we can buy or use.
I know that a Xerox 6085I (XPIW) with a 4045 Model 50 300dpi laser printer was around $30,000 in 1985. I think the 8010 was around 15-20K. The 8010 was networked only, whereas the 6085 was available as a stand alone workstation. Colleges and Universities received a large price break on the purchases of Xerox Documenter's etc.
There were a couple pieces of software which Xerox missed the boat on. One was a Spreadsheet program. I cannot remember what the other one was.
The first network laser printer was a modified Xerox 7000 copier. Later on came the 1700 Network printer (I think), then the 2700, followed by the 3700.
Smalltalk was the best thing about this whole project. Tell Ken to port the text-based browser Lynx to this system! That's totally doable.
Truly excellent work to get this up and working - its just amazing how far ahead Xerox were then, shame their Management at the time couldn't of handled things better, as they could have been the major name in computing instead of just known for producing photocopiers today . . .
It was a bit more than that. For the personal computer user, for instance a Star 8010 or 6085 price wise was unobtainable by the average computer user. A 6085 model 1 with a 4045 Model 50 Laser printer was around $30,000 in 1985. For education though the price was much lower.
I was lucky enough to play with them at PARC during development, when I was maybe 10; my friend's dad worked there and we'd go in with him on weekends. Just as how kids today are far better at using smartphones than adults, we took to the Alto instantly, with no preconceived notions of command line or whatever - we just grabbed the mouse and were off. I distinctly remember those discs seen on the table at 19:00 and how people were so excited about removable storage.
Beautiful job guys!! I'm so happy you got this restored and working so well. This was an amazing machine, LIGHT years ahead of its time, especially in the office environment. It would have been a different world today if Xerox cared more about their computer division. Ken, you're an Alto Master, and we're thankful that you've shared your knowledge of this system.
nice display. the resolution is highly acceptable today for word processing programs.
OMG! This is the same amazing insanity as a relay computer running x86 architecture software like Microsoft Edge!! This is so cool you guys were able to restore it! My faith in humankind has been restored ☺️👏👏🕊️ Bravo! When I grow up mabye I too like the great Robert Noyce can design a quantum computer 30yrs ahead of it's time. This will be my inspiration 😎💻💾
It's the high resolution that blows me away. And ofcourse the class definitions in smalltalk that is practically still standard today.
What's google gonna log as user agent?😃
The user agent would start as ....Your grandad
606×808 !! more than standard definition television !!
@@111danish111 600x800 = 800x600 if you flip the screen into landscape mode.... that was a screen resolution used in the 90's all the way up to 2002 when pentium 2 and 3 introduced fast enough 1024x768 graphic cards.
Xerox was sitting on a gold mine.
Joël Pichette Nope. Nobody could afford this stuff really, and by the time Mac came out in 1984, and Amiga in 1985, this one was instantly made obsolete. Even in the late 70s (78-79) these monster hard drives were long in the tooth, and an 8” floppy could hold 1MB of data with FM encoding, or 3MB had they splurged to implement PRML in the controller.
I don´t know exactly why,but i find this vintage computer stuff so fascinating.
Utterly Harry, utterly .
I think because it's cool to see where things started. Sort of like seeing pictures of your parents at your age. When you look at computers now you don't expect them to have so much in common with the past.
Great demo - and a wonderful restoration. Thanks to all who participated in making this a reality!!!
I've grown up being told the Xerox PARC Alto was where it all started, it was fantastic to see it in action. Brilliant video.
One thing I can see that maybe inspired Steve Jobs is that it has white interface and black letters/lines - not like most at that time where background was dark and lines and letters white. It has more open feeling - more light. And of course mouse and cursor is big thing. You can select with mouse very quickly another folder - no need to taping up or down button 10 times. And finally I have to admit it has really good design - it has that sci-fi feeling to it - white shell, black frame, oddly pleasing vertical screen with cool white glow and sharp image. Very minimalistic and functional at the same time. Only thing - not very intuitive for todays standards 50y later :). But you made great job restoring it. Really beautiful machine.
15:25 Apparently a rite of passage for any Smalltalk user was when they made so many changes to their system image that it would not boot any more, and they had to reinitialize it from scratch. ;)
That is simply incredible. 1973?!
Outstanding work guys.
Always been interested in the Alto, you've done a great job getting this machine running and thank you for posting these videos for everyone to watch.
Xerox PARC must have been an awesome place to work at back then. People invented their own stuff to work on next inventions. The team was cerafully selected from the brightest minds of that era. I read a great book about it - "Dealers Of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik.
it has been really great watching your Alto restoration videos and now this video showing the software examples is fantastic also.. thanks for taking the time to make them so we can all enjoy seeing this historic computer..
Xerox engineers is a masters of digital universe
Truly amazing job by Xerox back in the days! I can't believe it how they did it in the 70s.
Recompile while still running using the mouse 😨 with oriented object language in 1973 ... this is unbelievable
This is honestly blowing my mind, 1973??!!!
That keyboard sounds divine.
Priceless! Thankyou all so much for restoring and maintaining that machine. As a kid I read about the Alto and I am super happy to see that great demo.
So, I have rewatched the Alto restoration for the third or forth time now, and it still thrills me. This machine is so utterly amazing.
This thing is the real grandfather of the PC!
It's just pure awesome hardcore hardware porn at it's finest!
You insert a disk, then it sucks the air out and then you can *feel* every operation this machine does on the disk. :D
And all the modern features it has ... in 1973.
Unbelievable!
Xerox should be ruling the IT world, if only their management would have realized what they got there.
In an alternate universe all computers are made by xerox
Incredible. I’ve known about the Alto since the 90s but this is my first time seeing it in action... breathtaking!!! The way the draw program renders curves is beautiful. Thank you for an amazing demo!!!
Very satisfying to see all your efforts pay off... thanks for your work!
The simple physics used to govern the movement of the games impressed me the most.
I really appreciate vintage tech products , Nostalgia
My jaw hit the floor when he casually started showing FTP so effortlessly... And I had to pinch myself... Unbelievable for 1973.
Marc, thank you to you and your friends there for sharing this series about the restoration of your Alto. Great job getting that historic computer system up and running again.
Imagine if xerox followed through with this, we all would be using xerox phone now days. So impressive and ahead of its time.
They did. But their final product (the Xerox Star) was far inferior to Apple’s genius second implementation (the Macintosh, also coming after the failed Lisa), was unsuccessful in the marketplace and quickly forgotten.
have watched all the videos as they were released. amazing. great job.
We really took a step back from this technology. Just to think that this existed in 1973 and the concept want even used until '85 is insane.
How so? Inflation adjusted this was a 100k computer because of the complex components inside. Took a decade for Moore's law to run its course in miniaturizing chips to make this into a consumer purchase zone. For example, would anyone buy a 100k smartphone today in droves if it read brainwaves so you have an automatic human interface?
The Xerox Alto is VERY ahead of its time.
This blows me away...unreal and sureal alternate reality stuff
Great work guys! This machine must be worth a fortune now.
Excellent stuff - it's an amazing demonstration... I can see why Steve Jobs got excited over it!
The cat is hilarious. Great job on this amazing machine!
Now I see a computer I would have missed an opportunity to learn to use. I have done keypunch keyboarding on key-to-disk terminals and have not accomplished anything else than working overtime. As a staunch typist, I would have loved to work on the Xerox Alto. Now I am working on a Dell microcomputer with Microsoft Windows 10 Professional, and I do not unhappily miss routine work.
An absolute thing of beauty
I'm upside down. You have to see it to believe it. It is to see a computer so perfected for that time. No doubt Steve Job found these ideas from the Xerox Alto. The definition of the screen is probably what surprises me the most 😃
Incredibly interesting, thank you very much!
You Guys are Rock Stars, I hope to someday have a fraction of your talents in Software/hardware design and troubleshooting.
This was the highlight of my trip to VCF this year!
5:35 You know you've made a good product when you use it to make it's own documentation. Wild
Jobs said, at 96, that Xerox could be the Microsoft of the 90s, the Apple of the 80s, ..
I really like the sound of the key switches on the Alto's keyboard. What kind of key switches does it use?
Thank you for doing this for us! Fantastic!
Whoever (or whatever team) dreamt this all up was a genius.
Hard to imagine that Xerox never actually tried to market the Alto to the masses in the 70s’ probably at affordable prices. Otherwise, the names Microsoft and Apple will likely be unheard of. The product and the technology are so far ahead of its time.
how? building one cost more than building a house. and what would the masses have done with one. I remember 80s buzz around "personal computers", newspapers were speculating about what could you do with one.. common thing suggested was to organize your cookbook recipes. I mean unless you were running a business or were some kind of scientist a computer was pretty useless (of course playing games was for kids but computer is too expensive of a toy). it was actually pretty similar when world-wide web came around, it was awesome but what do you use it for? and yep "to look up recipes" was suggested. it took a long time to build the infrastructure between real world and online world before PCs became useful household items.
In the 70s there was no mass market for it, and it was impossible to build a computer like this at affordable prices. Components were just too expensive. Xerox might have been able to be first, but Apple implemented the ideas much better and Microsoft was extremely successful at making brilliant business deals despite having an inferior product so Xerox would have needed to step up their game both when it came to the product side, and the business side in order to be more successful. It is rarely the company that is "first" who succeeds.
@@dm8579 I don’t quite understand. If there is no market, create one like the narcotics business. Once people become hooked, the market will start to take shape. Also, affordable prices always depend on the economy itself. Perhaps prices in America are not so good, well offshore to China, Russia or some 3rd world countries for cheap labour and raw materials. Very much a matter of management’s acumen rather than actions.
@@davidchang5862 Yes labour is cheap in other parts of the world, but the problem was that chips and memory were very expensive at the time, like new technology always is. Much was also development costs. They could have cut the price a little but not as much as would be needed. And it is not easy to create a market just like that. It takes time.
12:30 The windows may overlap, but I believe the updates don’t handle that correctly. When Steve Jobs took his crew around, they never noticed that limitation. Bill Atkinson in particular, believed they had solved that problem. But they hadn’t: when he came up with his region architecture for QuickDraw, that was the first actual efficient solution to the problem of updating nonrectangular areas of the screen.
13:24 Yup.
The original Xerox engineers who developed the gui and the 2 innovations must be kicking themselves and the Xerox CEO for not having the vision
incredible machine
Fantastic demo! All the hard work you put into getting this system going again really shows. I wish I could have made VCF West to see it in person!
I should go through some of the functions on my Lisa in a similar in depth manor... you can see how some things are related, but they are really quite different systems.
Amazingly ahead of its time!
Thanks for sharing this series. So much amazing tech, 20 years before its time. Xerox could have been Apple and Microsoft (and perhaps Cisco) combined!
Historic Machine, History Right Here.
Its still amazing today how long a list can be when viewed in portrait.
Wow. I never knew Xerox was so advanced in their research. This really shows how Apple and Microsoft ripped them off with GUI and mouse design. Very informative video and history lesson !!
Это просто поразительная машина для своего времени. Вся эта система как будто создана человеком из будущего видевшим современные компьютерные системы, но ограниченным технологиями тех лет.
I remember seeing a commercial on TV briefly showing the Xerox Alto, about 1972-3 or so. I thought to myself that this was the future, and it was! I believed it odd that Xerox would show a TV commercial for something it didn't mass-produce and sell as a business machine. Xerox shelved it--Steve Jobs and Bill Gates picked it up and the rest is history!
8:01 The line may look thinner, but interestingly, the masking out of the underlying line remains the same width as before.
I miss the portrait orientation monitors of early computing.
Found an abandoned Xerox computer with 8" floppies and a big old amber monitor in portrait orientation.
When we got it back to my place I was able to boot it, but couldn't get it to do much besides list contents of the disk.
It had a really cool keyboard with a circular trackpad on it. So I was convinced it must have a GUI somewhere.
Really interesting and damn that guy sure knows a lot about this thing.
I just love vintage computers
Excelente trabajo de restauración, amigos les hago una pregunta: porque no trabajan también blanqueando los plásticos del monitor, mouse, unidades de disco etc? creo que sería lo que le devolvería también el toque original, es una sugerencia. Saludos desde Argentina y felicitaciones a todo el equipo.
So apple and window stole these ideas from xerox wow I will give a lots of respect for xerox thank you
Exactly
Actually Apple made a deal. Xerox got shares.
1 word - AMAZING for each time :))) bravo for rescurers
Its really impossible to believe that this machine is from 1973! 1973 Carl!
surprising resolution and font types. also the use of a three button mouse is well ahead of its time.
Woooow the legend itself.
Ken is a Legend.
The precursor to the precursor to the Mac! (Apple Lisa). Or was it the Star? ... in any case, this kind of demo is what blew Steve Jobs away and got him all fired up to create the prototype that would evolve into the Mac. An appliance computer for the masses! (I bought a 128K Mac in April 1984 for $4000, including an external 400K floppy disk drive and an ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Woohoo! Desktop Publishing here we come... ). So goes the lore anyway ...
Would be insane if you could get a browser stack running on that system. Would have to cheat with some modern hardware to network interface (which probably would have magnitudes more of processing power), but still, it would be really neat.
Its cool how x11 mouse commands were the same as alto. I really want to see blit are you guys going to ever do a demo of blit terminals? Draw is very intuitive.. text edit is a lot like laytex
Xerox dropped the ball big time when they failed to realize what they had. I'll never understand their decision not to pursue the Alto project, after having spent a lot of money funding Xerox PARC ? Lucky for us that Steve Jobs picked it up, refined it, and ran with it, so we can have Macs today...and Windows thanks to Bill Gates who simply copied Apple, who copied Xerox. ;-)
Great work on making the Alto system work again ! A very important piece of computer history.
This is a common misconception. Xerox *did* productize the Alto technology in the high-end Star workstations. But it was a closed system at a staggeringly high price point, and it did not succeed commercially. However, the laser printing technology did succeed very well within Xerox.
Yes indeed. I had forgotten about the Star System commercial venture. What amazes me is that the Alto doesn't use any microprocessors to do all that it does, which is sometimes rather computing intensive ! Anyway, this restoration project is a colossal piece of work by all of you guys. My hat's off to the team !
Thanks! It goes on to show that a good commercial product needs much more than just insanely great technology. Even more sadly, that some folks get to successfully commercialize some rather appalling technology. Particularly in the computer business. Don't get me started with the M... company ;-)
@@CuriousMarcdid you ever want to consider putting this desktop at a museum? If it’s gone cause of ever getting broken, software not working, anything that affects it, did you ever want to make sure that it’s condition will always remain the best that it is today by giving it to a museum that can place a glass box around it?
1973 - Elvis and Lennon are still singing, Nixon is still a president and there was a place on the Earth where you could just go and use PC with a GUI indistinguishable from the ones of Windows or Mac in 2020.
indistinguishable? time to go get that eye exam grandpa :)
@@snooks5607 well, yep, as we can see - some simple people are just very easy to be impressed with fancy shadows and transparent effects to believe that these are some cutting edge technology.
@@ukranaut but it isn't about being impressed, the word means you aren't able to differentiate between the two
@@snooks5607 oh yeah - they also unable to differentiate essense from an unimportant details.
Absolutely wonderful.
I probably either subliminally caught this, or maybe I read it somewhere, but isn’t the Alto literally taken from the town in central California, Palo Alto? I guess it’s got to be, since that’s where the research center is. Always entertaining and educational. THANKS AGAIN!!
The mouse cursor had such a long shaft.
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing this!
The Smalltalk is actually like Atom IDE. You can also program its look and feel through cascading stylesheets.
Vertical monitors are also favoured by some programmers nowadays.
Probably Windows Pinball is a game nod to this machine.
12:30. Bill Atkinson from Apple is the one that figured out over-lapping windows. The Alto people couldn't figure it out.