50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I read the book at a 17 year old shortly after it came out, and found it very very compelling.
https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...
Also, here is a thread about the book with Alan Kay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275
Another thread with Albert Cory is here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626413
There's another great book which puts Xerox PARC into context, "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop [0]. It goes into much detail about how Xerox PARC came to be and how the ideas behind it developed. It's the best book on the computer history I've read.
My book takes the path of putting fictional characters (except for Dan, who is me) in it, who do not know how it's going to turn out. I had the help of nearly everyone who's still alive, and all the actual events really happened. Xerox really did have a guy with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions at the trade shows.
As for the 40+ year-old debate about what Xerox should have done, Jerry Morrison and I considered that at length here:
I didnt realize you did 3+Mail too, the whole 3com office suite and hardware is something almost lost to history, same with 3com NBX PBX.
Actual events like me pulling apart the ThinNet Ethernet cable and taking down the entire company for a few seconds (no one noticed),
The Lisa adopting Hungarian notation because of the Simonyi influence (in one part of the code).
DataPoint having a terrific LAN before anyone else, and going nowhere with it.
3Com buying Bridge, a leader in routers, and running it into the ground, meanwhile ignoring Cisco.
3Com'ers spending all day arguing about a post on WantAds, because they were so desperate for a social network.
New, but possible, industries last only for a moment. Gathering talent for that moment and just letting them create, results in an explosion. It's rare precisely because its impossible to manufacture.
These days money is easy. People is harder. Right-Time is impossible. Computing is ubiquitous, nothing new will have the same depth as PARC. The biggest change since PARC has been touch screens. That's significant, but a single technology.
When PARC happens again it won't be in tech, but in some other field, something that's new, but possible.
I have lived a life in the shadow and shade that PARC created. I tip my hat, raise a glass and salute you all.
I think we’re right around the Right-Time era for biotech and genetic engineering. CRISPR is easily Xerox PARC level of influence on the next era of tech.
E.g payment systems and logistic solutions.
Cloud also changed a lot.
I despair that we've all got astonishing computer power but it hasn't got us far at all. If anything, we just accept poorer apps and less efficient systems. Though they do look prettier. Sigh.
Kids today on their laptops have more music tools than a $500,000 studio would have had 20 years ago.
VSCode compared to the tools I used in the 90s blows my mind every day. I'll be like 'hmmm, you know what would be a nice tool/feature' go to marketplace, yep, someone made it and I am now using it 5 minutes after having a thought.
My son moved to a remote location yet can keep in touch with friends and family easily sharing videos/playing games together. I talked to my grandparents once every other month over a poor quality phone call. Cost of communication isn't even a consideration when I reach out to my son today.
https://www.ableton.com/en/ https://code.visualstudio.com/ https://store.steampowered.com/
Electronic music has been around for ages - I was a great fan of Kraftwerk. Your kids have huge amounts of music, I had a bit - they are doing the same thing, just more of it.
You love VSCode - but you're using it to cut code at the same (or similar) level of complexity to what I was cutting 40 years ago. Maybe quicker, or easier, but essentially the same activity.
Comms is cheaper and easier (I remember when email became a thing - wow - we had a stable route from Oz to MIT - back in the uucp days!) but we're doing what we always did - talking and writing to each other.
Where are the new things? The things that didn't exist previously? What are we using this tech for, that we just couldn't do before?
The only answers that has been a little convincing is gaming and big data. It wasn't possible/practical to do large scale simulation before. But many of our games are largely the same old activities ... shoot-em-ups, DnD. The tiny "retro" games might be one of few things that just didn't exist before "micro" tech. And big data (eg. ChatGPT) just wasn't possible before enormous amounts of accessible data ... but it's looking like it's just a great Eliza :(
However there are some new useful things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, more convenient and accurate map applications as opposed to old GPS systems, instant text recognition and translation of images on your phone. But these aren't based on flashy technology, just incremental improvements like your examples.
I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.
I'm intrigued. Any specifics about design decisions come to mind?
It was shocking!
They also had a LAN where H/W engineers submitted their (graphically captured) schematics to the in-house PCB fab, via electronic transfer.
A week or two later, their prototype PCBs would arrive via the mail delivery robot!!! I'm not kidding, the robot would follow it's route and beep in front of an individual's office when they had mail on the cart.
It was WAY more back-to-the-future than any bullshit dispensed by M$ and Goggle today.
And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago? Quite simple really: technical innovation is not seen as driving shareholder value.
Why should a company invent something new when its "more productive" to just squeeze their vendors, employees and customers more tightly?
This is really in the same vein as M$ brain damaging billions of people into thinking "this is what a computer is".
There are no current trends in opposition of this corporate domination.
If you think housing, economic equity, or employee rights are trampled today, just wait. It's only going to get worse, until the mass of the population wakes up to who is actually screwing them!
It wasn't hippy tree huggers that sent all US manufacturing to China. undermining the entire US workforce, and leading to the current situation. Where those same assholes are now crying about the advancement of Chinese efforts to enact it's own world domination. CEOs paid for that rise in Chinese aggression by buying the crack of products produced with cheap slave labor. While continuing to dumb down the US population, and sell the same computer that Xerox didn't know what to do with 50 years ago.
Prepare yourself, it's only going to get worse...
i also wonder at the amount of DARPA/DoD/secret funds that went into the early advances, and where they are now (a cia guy told me they saved Sun from bankruptcy early on by buying a bunch of machines, Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, etc )
no, it was the aliens on a side trip after they visited Roswell.
Smalltalk didn't have a "killer app."
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...
https://comp.lang.smalltalk.narkive.com/hZvXNNyC/xsis-the-an...
Smalltalk's never been any more than an intellectual influence, albeit a big one.
Normally it is associated with making something very popular, and in that regard the Analyst certainly wasn't. But it did get a small group to buy absurdly expensive D-machines from Xerox just to run it, though I think it was more than those who bought them to run Lisp:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/dolphin/1100_Scientific_I...
More about the Analyst from later in its life:
Well, in of itself it doesn't. You need to come up with technology that has applied uses that people are willing to pay for.
The Xerox WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pointers) UI was (and still is) very well adapted to desktop computers with increasingly large screens and increasingly powerful CPUs (multi-tasking - windowed UI), as well as to humans that are very visually driven as well as adapted to use hands (mouse) to manipulate things.
Finally, in recent years we are moving past WIMP, especially for mobile, in the guise of user interfaces driven by gestures, voice and now (ChatGPT) natural language interaction. These are again things that play to human interaction modalities, but have only been enabled (as well as demanded - mobile form factor) by technological advance.
To break through that, a new interface paradigm has to be massively better - enough better that it's worth buying a new computer, a new OS, and all-new apps (from a very limited selection) to get it. That's an insanely high bar, which no alternative to the WIMP interface has cleared. So the WIMP interface continues unchallenged... except for phones. It's going to continue to rule the desktop/laptop world, though, and not because of "corporate greed". WIMP will continue because nothing is enough better to be worth the cost of switching.
WIMP on hand held devices isn't great (ask early windows mobile). It's just too fiddly. But if touchscreen interfaces were better at a desk, we'd be doing that on desktops and laptops now. Touchscreens are readily available, it's just way more effective to have an interface that isn't occluded by using it.
Voice based interfaces clearlty work for some, but they're really fiddly for non-linear access.
The ergonomics of touch desktops don't really work. Lifting your arm (big muscle groups) and trying to manipulate fingertip sized widgets (fine motor muscles) in concert is very strenuous. There's a reason writing apologies on a chalkboard used to be punishment in schools.
For one-off activities or very short sessions it might work for some people. However the WIMP interface with its proxied inputs of a keyboard and mouse work far better for more people for longer durations.
Touch and direct input like a stylus works much better on displays that can sit horizontal (or mostly so). No matter how good a touch interface is, people just physically can't use them for long periods on a vertical display.
Yes, and if you set up a horizontal display for a desk, you're going to end up with neck strain. You could maybe do something at an angle, like a drafting table, but probably still balancing neck and arm issues. And you'd probably need to adjust display construction to reduce the distortion from viewing it at such a high vertical angle.
So the WIMP interface continues unchallenged... except for phones.
Alan Kay gave a couple lectures at Stanford on "How to Invent the Future" and went over all the stuff that came out of there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ
Much of what we use today was conceptualized 50+ years ago. PARC's outputs paid off immensely for Xerox over a very long period of time since they picked a tech (laser printing) that was perfect for their wheelhouse. Companies and our culture these days don't allow for exploration like PARC was allowed. There is too much focus on monetizing everything and having an ROI.
For a while Blue Skies research labs such as PARC, IBM Watson, Bell Labs seemed to have disappeared, but arguably they are back (different companies/labs though) now with a focus on ML/AI. I'm not sure which commercial labs are still doing fundamental material science research though.
The working class still hasn't recovered from what NAFTA did to our share of wealth. (I'm trying to find the tweet + graph where I learned this in vain)
29 years later and we haven't caught up. The TPP (NAFTA, but for China) would have made it worse.
Further reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
A lot of people have been voting for who has been screwing them since they pulled the lever for Saint Ronny with both hands. Why would they realize anything now?
I like the current interface of mouse, monitor and keyboard.
I hate using phone apps. The keyboard is too small, and I hate typing with my thumbs, and the screen is too small. When the iPad came out, Apple fanboys says everyone would only use phones and tablets within 5 years. It has been about 12, and a lot of people are still using laptops and desktops.
And voice interface will probably be a disaster. Everyone thinks it will be like "Star Trek", where they have actors who know how to deliver lines. Most people do not speak that well.
To give an extreme example: I know one guy (with a CS degree from UT, no less) who honestly says more filler words than actual words. "Um" and "ah" are his favorites. Then when he does get a sentence going, he stops halfway through, gives you another ten seconds of filler words, and starts a different one. I think if this guy tried a computer with a voice interface, it would achieve the singularity just to smack him.
Amazingly enough: His wife is from Taiwan, he met her when he spent a few years in Taiwan, and I have seen icons w/Chinese characters on his screen. I wonder if he speaks Chinese the same way he speaks English.
Robert Smith of the Cure said one day he and his wife noticed they had left a camera on after recording a message, so they watched the rest. He said they quickly devolved and were shocked at how dumb they sounded.
As for the "um" and "ah": people adopt a stilted, formal method of speaking with VR systems. It's no more natural than typing an email.
The future I was promised... sigh.
Nice roof garden though.
That’s why I don’t like having tech giants like Apple and MS. Their output in terms of innovation is very low compared to their size. But they are big enough to either suppress or buy any innovation that’s coming from smaller players.
The Alto in 1975, when I first saw one, was a very expensive machine. It was a minicomputer, a modified Data General machine. Affordable hardware to do that was over a decade away. Along the way was the Xerox Star (too expensive), the Apple Lisa (too expensive), the original Macintosh (too underpowered), quite a few workstations based on Unix and Motorola 68000s (expensive but usable), and the forgotten era of shared-logic word processors (affordable, but dumb). It wasn't until the late 1980s that a mass-market Smalltalk machine was affordable.
Xerox never had any interest in selling for home use, and it was a genuine shock when Apple proceeded to do exactly that, and office workers started bringing their Apple II's to work so they could use VisiCalc.
Something everyone at Xerox would prefer to forget: they rushed out the 820 to stop that shit, a CP/M based PC that they called, believe it or not, "the Apple killer." You probably think I'm making that up.
I was there. Star 1.0 had no spreadsheet, believe it or not. Spreadsheets were in people's minds, but it was way too late to add one in.
Lastly, it's claimed by multiple Xeroids that the laser printers made enough money for Xerox to pay for all of PARC's expenses, easily. I tried to verify that, but it's just not possible.
[1] Another example was HP not wanting Woz working on their PC... I guess the 'professionals' had everything under control?
With, of course, the minor exception of that easily forgotten serious tech company (IBM).
https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
miraculously, they broke free of the IBM bureaucracy. For a while.
[1] They decided the OS wasn't that important... sure, let Microsoft own that. The CPU architecture wasn't that important... sure, let Intel own that. Just glue a bunch of off-the-shelf logic together for the rest. After all, the real value is in the IBM logo on the box. What could possibly go wrong?
[2] Sure, they were calling the shots for the 8086 and (mostly) 80286 generations. They tried to rectify their mistake over half a decade later with the PS/2 (i.e. proprietary everything) but by then it was too late. Compaq and the clone makers owned the market from the 80386 on.
[3] Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
> did a half-assed PC design to rush something to market
the alternative to "half-assed" and "off the shelf" would have been "an IBM-wide committee taking 5 years to do an all-IBM device that cost $30,000." They "rushed it out" because the market was moving fast and a ponderous bureaucracy would have missed it.
For a number of years, "IBM-compatible" was the buzzword in PCs. The market was simply too big for them to keep owning it. There were still good profits to be made on customers who prided themselves on being all-IBM. They could have led the army instead of being the army as they had in the mainframe days. That would have required a subtlety that just wasn't in them.
The PS/2 and OS/2 were indeed mistakes and helped make them a joke.
Which IBM did. They built the IBM Instruments Computer System Model 9000. Came out in 1982.
> Reasons cited for the failure of the System 9000 were its poor performance and high price, which led to the IBM PC being used where price was of concern, and to other 32-bit microcomputers being used where performance mattered.[10] IBM closed its Instrument division in January 1987, reassigning the approximately 150 employees that had worked for it to other positions.
150 employees? they'd use that many people to give names to the broom closets.
The article mentions that "Kay gambled his budget on Lampson and Thacker’s proposal, calling it the “Interim Dynabook.”" and this budget was for Kay's group to buy more Novas and add a frame buffer to them and high resolution displays like they already had been doing. Smalltalk-72 initially ran on one of these modified Novas. With the default emulation the Alto ran all this old code right away.
Later on the Alto's flexibility allowed them to do things the Novas couldn't, like implement BitBLT and run Smalltalk or Mesa bytecodes directly. So they were not only a bridge to the past, but to the future as well.
Some people who wanted an Alto but couldn't get it made their own:
Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.
PARC's real legacy was the creation of a workable model for non-expert UIs. The Smalltalk/LISP angle was never going to be more than incidental.
I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be.
AI promises to be at least as transformative because it won't be long - more than five, less than ten years - before it allows complex customised context-aware task-oriented voice commands that aren't mired in the thousands of random switches, file location inconsistencies, and other dinosaur bullshit of the UNIX command line.
Introduce kids to Scratch and they will program. Have someone use Excel and they will program, though they won't say that's what they're doing!
> I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be.
I don't think we can say this with any certainty. Most people have never had an environment like this available to them.
More and more computing is going up into the 'cloud' which is just "fancy" for someone else's computing mainframe.
That mouse is not shaped to the right hand. There is no reason to assign significance to it in my opinion.
1. My family was poor, I didn't have access to a computer that was ours so I only used other people's and it was set up with mouse on right
2. Video games would require so much effort to rebind to play comfortably with mouse on left
Now as an adult I have a symmetrical mouse and switch which side I use during the workday (where I mostly am just typing and not mousing) occasionally for comfort
There's a YT video about General Magic that tries to paint them that way, and they thought of themselves that way at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
Take it all with a grain of salt.
Then we also have The Mother of all demos which was influental for the Xerox Palo Alto.
The mother of all demos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY