Why Alto? Butler Lampson's Historic 1972 Memo

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11 pointsb-man3 comments

I'm a huge fan of Butler Lampson, but I must confess the thing that most struck me at the beginning were the machine specs in contrast to today's machines. 48-64K of 16-bit words with a 10 MB hard drive, woohoo!

The display size and orientation is a little disconcerting, though. You mean there was a time when computer screens weren't optimized for playing widescreen movies?

I remember that the monitor for the first computer I had -- a Mac IIci -- was in portrait format, and could show a full page of a word document. I thought all monitors looked like that, until I went to a friend's place and saw a landscape monitor. I asked him, "how do you survive without being able to see a full page?!" His response: how do you survive without being able to play games?

"Imlacs are wiped out."

Priceless. --Chuck

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