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You can be too early.

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.

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That was the entire point of what they were doing at PARC: build a possible computing future. They were not trying to build a mass market solution, they were trying to pull what could be commonplace 10-15 years in the future with smart, motivated people and money-is-no-object hardware budgets. Sure, they couldn't turn it into products in the 70's, but they would have had one hell of a product roadmap for the next 50 years if management understood what they had.

"Xerox PARC" is not one word. There was PARC, and then there was SDD, which was trying to turn it into a business product (not a mass market). Something that Xerox would sell for "knowledge workers" in Fortune 500 companies.

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.

I wasn't there, but I've heard/read accounts from those who were... so I believe you. None of the 'serious' tech companies back then took 'personal' computing (whether at home or the office) seriously. They were too entrenched in the server room mentality. When the upstarts made it obvious the business they were losing out on, they scrambled to shove some products out the door but ultimately failed at least in part because they still didn't understand the space.[1] This is part of why none of them are around to any significant degree today.

[1] Another example was HP not wanting Woz working on their PC... I guess the 'professionals' had everything under control?

> None of the 'serious' tech companies back then took 'personal' computing (whether at home or the office) seriously.

With, of course, the minor exception of that easily forgotten serious tech company (IBM).

That story is in our page on what Xerox should have done:

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

miraculously, they broke free of the IBM bureaucracy. For a while.

No, I would include IBM high on the list. IBM did a half-assed PC design to rush something to market[1] after being late to PCs which was a significant factor in why they lost control of the PC market a handful of years after entering it.[2] They actually had a few shots at a comeback (the Thinkpad was a great laptop etc.) but didn't like margins and decided to become a services business instead[3]... how's that working out?

[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?

I think this analysis is truthy, as opposed to true.

> 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.

> 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."

Which IBM did. They built the IBM Instruments Computer System Model 9000. Came out in 1982.

A hot seller, that was. Wikipedia says:

> 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.

That was indeed the thinking in the mid-1970s. But that was just after Xerox's peak profit years. Wikipedia: "Following these years of record profits, in 1975, Xerox resolved an anti-trust suit with the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which at the time was under the direction of Frederic M. Scherer. The Xerox consent decree resulted in the forced licensing of the company's entire patent portfolio, mainly to Japanese competitors. Within four years of the consent decree, Xerox's share of the U.S. copier market dropped from nearly 100% to less than 14%.[31]"

True, but it was never Xerox's thinking and they didn't do it out of altruism. The government was breathing down their necks re: antitrust in the late 60's (i.e. the peak profit years) and taking on some of the ARPA projects at PARC helped buy Xerox some time on that front. They also only had a 5 year commitment to the projects and based on a couple of oral histories I've heard, it sounds like they started dismantling things as soon as they could.

The Alto could emulate different instruction sets via microcode (like their previous machine emulated a PDP-10) and it came with a built in emulation for the Data General Nova, but internally it was a very different machine. The biggest similarity was that it used the same ALU chip, the 74181.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)

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