 The Xerox Alto monitor has a portrait orientation. The Xerox Alto was an early personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI). Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1920x2560, 2058 KB) Summary Photo of the Xerox Alto, taken by Martin Pittenauer, URL accessed May 21, 2006. ...
Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1920x2560, 2058 KB) Summary Photo of the Xerox Alto, taken by Martin Pittenauer, URL accessed May 21, 2006. ...
Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ...
For the song by James Blunt, see 1973 (song). ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Desktop_environment. ...
“GUI†redirects here. ...
Although it was not a commercial product, several thousand units were built and were heavily used at PARC and at several universities for several years. The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers in the following decades, notably the Macintosh and the first Sun workstations. It is now very rare and a valuable collector's item. The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
Architecture
The Alto was first conceptualized in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, and designed primarily by Chuck Thacker. It had 128 (expandable to 512) Kbytes of main memory and a hard disk with a removable 2.5 Mbyte cartridge, all housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator. The Alto's CPU was a very innovative microcoded processor which used microcode for most of the I/O functions rather than hardware. The microcode machine had 16 tasks, one of which executed the normal instruction set (which was rather like a Data General Nova), with the others used for the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. As an example, the bit map display controller was little more than a 16-bit shift register; microcode was used to fetch display refresh data from main memory and put it in the shift register. Year 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Butler W. Lampson is a computer scientist, considered to be one of the most significant in the history of the field. ...
Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker is a technical fellow and computer pioneer. ...
A kilobyte (derived from the SI prefix kilo-, meaning 1,000) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to either 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes (210), depending on context. ...
Primary storage is a category of computer storage, often called main memory. ...
Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
ReBoot character, see Megabyte (ReBoot). ...
Fridge redirects here. ...
“CPU†redirects here. ...
A microprogram is a program consisting of microcode that controls the different parts of a computers central processing unit (CPU). ...
Energy Input: The energy placed into a reaction. ...
Data General SuperNova The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. ...
In digital circuits a shift register is a group of flip flops set up in a linear fashion which have their inputs and outputs connected together in such a way that the data are shifted down the line when the circuit is activated. ...
Apart from an Ethernet connection, the Alto's only common output device was a bi-level (black and white) CRT display, mounted in a vertical, "portrait" orientation in contrast to the more common horizontal "landscape" orientation. Its input devices were a custom keyboard, a three-button mouse, and an optional 5-key chord keyset. The last two items were borrowed from SRI's On-Line System; while the mouse was an instant success among Alto users, the chord keyset never became popular. Ethernet is a large, diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies that operate at many speeds for local area networks (LANs). ...
Cathode ray tube employing electromagnetic focus and deflection Cutaway rendering of a color CRT: 1. ...
A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record. ...
A 104-key PC US English QWERTY keyboard layout The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout A standard Hebrew keyboard showing both Hebrew and QWERTY. A computer keyboard is a peripheral partially modelled after the typewriter keyboard. ...
Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ...
The chord keyset is a small computer keyboard with a look and feel similar to those of a piano. ...
SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ...
NLS, or the oNLine System, was the revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. ...
All Alto mice had three buttons. The earliest mice were mechanical and used two wheels perpendicular to each other. These were soon replaced with ball-type mice, which were invented by Bill English. Later, optical mice were introduced, first using white light and then using IR. The buttons on the early mice were narrow bars arranged top to bottom rather than side to side. Bill English is a computer engineer who contributed to the development of the computer mouse while working for Doug Engelbart at SRI. He left SRI in 1971 and headed to Xerox Parc where managed the Office Systems Research Group. ...
The keyboard was interesting in that each key was represented as a separate bit in a set of registers. This characteristic was used to alter where the Alto would boot from. The keyboard registers were used as the address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems could be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release required more fingers than you could come up with. Nose boots were made obsolete by the "move2keys" program that shifted files on the disk so that a specified key sequence could be used.
A number of other I/O devices were available for the Alto, including a TV camera, the Hy-Type daisywheel printer and a parallel port, although these were quite rare. The Alto could also control external disk drives to act as a file server. This was a common application for the machine.
Software Early software for the Alto was written in the BCPL programming language, and later in the Mesa programming language, which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula. The Alto keyboard was lacking the underscore key, which had been appropriated for the left-arrow character used in Mesa for the assignment operator. This feature of the Alto keyboard may have been the source for the CamelCase style for compound identifiers. Another feature of the Alto was that it was microcode-programmable by the user. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a computer programming language that was designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge (1966) as a response to difficulties with its predecessor CPL during the 1960s. ...
Mesa is a programming language developed at Xerox PARC that was used to program the Xerox Alto (one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface), and later the Xerox Star workstations, and later the GlobalView desktop environment. ...
In the mid-1970s, after designing the Pascal programming language, Niklaus Wirth began experimenting with program concurrency and modularization, which led to the design of the Modula programming language. ...
The underscore _ is the character with ASCII value 95. ...
In most imperative computer programming languages, the assignment operation is one of the basic operations. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
Identifiers (IDs) are lexical tokens that name entities. ...
The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced the concept of the bit block transfer operation, or BitBLT, as the fundamental programming interface to the display. In spite of its small memory size, quite a number of innovative programs were written for the Alto, including the first WYSIWYG document preparation systems Bravo and Gypsy, editors for graphical data (bitmaps, printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, etc.), the first versions of the Smalltalk environment, and one of the first network-based multi-person computer games (Alto Trek by Gene Ball). Imagine the smiley face in the top left corner as an RGB bitmap image. ...
Bit blit (bitblt, blitting etc. ...
WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [] or []), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...
A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ...
Bravo was the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. ...
Gypsy was the first modern document preparation system, using the modern style of graphical user interface (in which the mouse was used to initiate commands), and would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer. ...
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Part of a 1983 Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer board. ...
Integrated circuit of Atmel Diopsis 740 System on Chip showing memory blocks, logic and input/output pads around the periphery Microchips with a transparent window, showing the integrated circuit inside. ...
For other uses, see Small talk. ...
A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ...
Alto Trek is a computer game, developed for the Xerox Alto in 1972. ...
Diffusion and evolution Technically, the Alto was a small minicomputer, but it could be considered a personal computer in the sense that it was used by a single person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframes and other minicomputers of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others[1] For other uses, see Mainframe. ...
Minicomputer (colloquially, mini) is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (traditionally, mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
The Alto was never a commercial product, although several thousand were built. Universities, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, and the University of Rochester received donations of Altos including IFS file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines were the one inspiration for the ETH Zürich Lilith and Three Rivers Company PERQ workstations, and the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which was eventually marketed by a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems. The Apollo/Domain workstation and Apple Lisa also were heavily influenced by the Alto. Lilith is the name of custom built workstation (originating sometimes before 1980) using the AMD 2901 bit-slice processor by the group of Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. ...
PERQ, often referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ, was an influential computer workstation first released in 1979. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
Apollo/Domain was a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computers, Inc. ...
The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. ...
A trip to Xerox PARC by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs in 1979 led to the graphical user interface and mouse being integrated into the Apple Lisa and, later, the first Macintosh[2]. Steve Jobs was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven GUI interface provided by the Alto. In the same year the mousepad was patented by PARC's Armando M. Fernandez [1]. Apple Inc. ...
Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. ...
“GUI†redirects here. ...
Apple Inc. ...
The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. ...
The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. ...
WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [] or []), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...
The Xerox Alto was used to design the next influential "D" series of workstations: the Dolphin, Dorado and Dandelion. A network router called Dicentra was also based on this design. Dolphin was a mid-line TTL design originally intended to be the Star workstation while Dorado had a very fast ECL based design. The original architecture for the Dandelion, based on the AMD Am2900 bitslice microprocessor technology, was presented as a paper design called Wildflower and was the low-cost design that became the actual Star workstation. This article is about a computer networking device. ...
A Motorola 68000-based computer with various TTL chips. ...
In electronics, emitter coupled logic, or ECL, is a logic family in which current is steered through bipolar transistors to compute logical functions. ...
Am2900 is a family integrated circuits (ICs) created in 1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). ...
This article or section seems not to be written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia entry. ...
Xerox and the Alto Xerox itself was slow to realize the value of the technology that had been developed at PARC. After their unhappy experience with SDS (later XDS) in the late 1960s, the company was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs. So, when the success of IBM's Personal Computer finally pushed Xerox to offer a PC of their own, they pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse. Scientific Data Systems, or SDS, was a computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky, a veteran of Packard Bell and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. ...
When Xerox finally decided to commercialize the work of PARC, they chose to use the Dolphin as the basis for a high-end workstation product. The Dandelion design became the Xerox 8010, which ran the Xerox Star workstation software; it was the first commercial product to incorporate a GUI, including icons, windows, and folders. However, these expensive workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that appeared in the wake of the first Macintosh. The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. ...
See also Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of German descent. ...
The NLS workstation showing the CRT display, keyboard, pushbuttons, and mouse NLS, or the oNLine System, was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. ...
For the free Unix text editor, see Mousepad (editor) A typical mousepad with an optical mouse A mousepad (sometimes mouse pad, mousemat, or mouse mat), is a surface for enhancing the usability of a computer mouse. ...
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. ...
Bit blit (bitblt, blitting etc. ...
Ethernet is a large, diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies that operate at many speeds for local area networks (LANs). ...
The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. ...
The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. ...
Further reading - Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999)
- Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (William Morrow, New York, 1988)
References - Alto User's Handbook, Xerox PARC, September 1979
- ^ Personal Computer Milestones. Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute. Retrieved on 2006-12-31.
- ^ PBS Triumph of the Nerds Television Program Transcripts: Part III. PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Retrieved on 2007-02-08.
Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
is the 365th day of the year (366th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ...
is the 39th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...
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