Xerox's Missed Opportunity: The Rise and Fall of the Xerox Star
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- #xerox #alto
They invented the concept of a personal computer but simply gave the idea away to Apple and Steve Jobs, and later Microsoft. When revenues from the copier business grew to a very profitable $1 billion-plus annually. A Xerox center for computer research, located in Palo Alto, was created. It would be known as Xerox PARC. The computer the team at PARC ended up building was the Xerox Alto, the computer that laid the foundation for the modern computing world. The Xerox Alto was a computer designed to support a Graphical User Interface based operating system in the year 1973 a full decade before the first mass market GUI based computers would be released.
Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos had been put into operation at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices. In 1977 three personal computers including the Apple 2 were launched, they were all great successes and began the personal computing revolution. Xerox ran a commercial for a computer but it wasn’t the Alto instead it was the Xerox Star.
Members of the Lisa engineering team saw a presentation of the Xerox Star in early 1981 and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Several members of PARC were also recruited to Microsoft where they were instrumental in the creation of Microsoft Word and the Windows operating system.
Where I worked, our purchasing department converted to all Macintosh in 1989, to take advantage of the AppleTalk phone line networking that would let them share files and also a laser printer, which were just becoming affordable at the time.
Just after the Atari Home Computer was released, Atari was sold to Warner Communications who had no idea how to sell a home computer, so they focused mainly on releasing game cartridges.
Apple successfully sued Digital Research over "look and feel" for DR's GEM graphic user interface, widely used on the Atari ST "Jackintosh." The installed base of Atari computers weren't something Apple thought they could fight, but DR was planning a release for the IBM PC.
Apple won their suit and GEM for the PC could only have windows that extended to both sides of the screen, along with other changes that made it almost unusable and a failure on the PC.
That's very interesting so there were instances were lawsuits over GUIs were won because while research this video I briefly read about the lawsuit Apple filled against Microsoft that was alleging essentially the same thing which was that Microsoft stole the "look and feel" of Apple's operating system but Apple lost the suit.
copyright is really a tragedy
There are so many cool things invented in companies that never get commercialised or released so im gkad Apple found and ran with the GUI so we are where we are today.
Can we all just take a moment to bask in the glory of xerox as the one being copied rather than the one doing the copying?
I'll bask in the glory of the engineers but not Xerox who stifled it and would have eventually killed it.
Much has been said about Apple "stealing" ideas from Xerox. There is much to be said about how Jobs & co could turn the Xerox ideas into a desirable product and sell it on a large scale. And apple still had to endure years of underwhelming sales before the Mac took off
That's very true, its one thing to conceptualize a revolutionary idea its another thing to actually revolutionize the world.
its probably because the gui required powerful hardware that was too big and expensive the Xerox alto was a very big and expensive device. about the size of a fridge and more expensive than a house .when apple made the apple Lisa it was still too expensive and big .so it took until the mac when they could make it cheap enough for the consumer .the very expensive computers would usually be used by people who had a lot of technical knowledge and didn't need a gui. but when computers became affordable to regular people they had to make things more user friendly and there was a bigger demand for it. i am sure that if apple didn't do it other companies would have made computers with a gui instead .
It may be noted that the Xerox was crucially not into microporocessors. E.g., the Star was based on the Dandelion processor, a multiboard, discrete component processor (as was the Alto.) The problem may have really been that this kind of technology was phasing out, right when the Star came to market - and, while a substantial part of PARC was not about computers and software, but about very large integration chips and optics, Xerox had no standing in the new rechnology. (As a result, the Star was already at its limits, and Xerox may have struggled to reinvent itself for the microcomputer world, just for the next iteration.)
Also, the Star was severely tied downand hampered by software licenses. (Think, "Want to use italic font style? Well, buy and install a license for that.") And this may have well been the greates impact of management nor understanding the emerging personal computer and office workstation market.
BTW, what the Apple delegation was shown, was not the Star. The kind of software shown was on the Alto, there was no general GUI, rather this was left to implement to individual applications, and there were no icons, no framework for windows, etc. That kind of refinement into a consistent operating system and GUI language happened not at PARC, but at Xerox Systems Development Department (SDD) at El Segundo. (It's kind of annoying that the folks at SDD don't get recognition for this.)
Brilliant Point! I perhaps should have made the distinction more clearer that this wasn't a microprocessor meant to be in homes but a workstation targeted at large corporations. I also should have given Xerox SDD its proper recognition in the video.
@@Tech_History_Channel Never mind, nobody cares about Xerox SSD… ;-)
In Meme format: "Ridiculous: Xerox failed to commercialize the GUI!" Also: Xerox SSD designed from principles and developed and shipped the first general GUI. - "Nobody cares."
Xerox was actually remarkably quick in commercializing PARC developments: 1973 saw the development of what became Ethernet and In 1976 Smalltalk-76 was the first stable version of Smalltalk (featuring what we would recognize as windows and menus). Later that year, development for what became the Star started (or 1977 in ernest). In just a few years Xerox had Installations in Jimmy Carter's White House and introduced the Star in 1981, with new hardware, OS & GUI desktop, applications, network, laser printer, etc.
It was more that Xerox didn't understand how to market that thing (see the ridiculous licensing) and that it was just too early, with potent microprocessors just emerging and memory being still way too expensive for a consumer-viable bitmapped OS. (This was also why Three Rivers' PERQ and Apple's Lisa struggled und ultimately failed in the next few years. The Mac just made it, with severe downgrades and less useable memory than a home computer (compare the Mac's initial 128K vs 2MB of the Lisa, no included application suite, no multitasking - the Lisa switched applications instantly, while on the Mac, this took about 2 minutes including diskette handling), saved by the - initially also ridicoulsly expensive - LaserWriter and the desktop publishing revolution. As compared to the Lisa, the Mac had also the crucial advantage of the M68000 processor actually being available during development and that the architecture was not tuned to the lower speed of the development emulator of that processor, but could exploit its true speed.)
This is a brilliant analysis!
@@Tech_History_Channel Another factor is also marketing. I guess, no corporation ever bought a computer on its own merits. IBM succeeded triumphantly, because their standing marketing force met customers in the gleeful ignorance of computers. (Why should this thing multiply? See, it's not using high-speed tape, but the same punched cards, you have warehouses full of, already.)
This new kind of computer, which also implied and aimed at a revolution of the very concept of the office, was much harder to explain and to communicate. And this was probably asked too much from a sales force that was oriented at leasing licenses for photocopiers that would integrate seamlessly ("what's the copy, what's the original?") into office paper work.
Again, we may glance at the Mac, which probably managed to succeed, because it aimed at individual customers (but also failed at making it at scale into offices).
PS: A nice side story is the marketing of Datapoint Corporation, originally Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC): The Datapoint 2200 was marketed originally as an intelligent Terminal, but was actually the first commercially somewhat successful PC, and, most notably, the blueprint for the Intel 8008 processor. Datapoint managed to stay ahead of its microprocessor brethren using custom, discrete processors well into the i386-era and had also one of the first viable network/LAN solutions with ARCNET (still around in some niche applications).
So, were they able to sell these systems on their own merit? Not really, What they eventually did was looking for managers with "trophy wives" and a somewhat troubled marital status. Instead of even trying to convey the merits of the system, they gave those managers a last straw and an opportunity to prove themselves by a maverick stunt in acquisitions. - This is how you sell computers!
(Recommended reading: Lemont Wood, Datapoint - The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution; Hugo House Publishers, TX, 2010 - It may be great to have an informed video about this [wink].)
@noland65 I love this Comment, I am definitely going to read up on Datapoint and it will most probably be a future video, thank you for really insightful analysis!
I wonder how the leadership that was there when Alto was being pitched felt when the computing industry started booming
Probably kicking themselves!
Its like Google inventing Transformers, but OpenAI lead the way in commercialization. History rhymes!
That's very true!
Awesome
👍👍👍