Xerox Alto Source Code (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)

computerhistory.org

117 pointstodsacerdoti26 comments

The Alto is another example of what Xerox could have been had it not been so wedded to putting dots on paper. In my twenty years at Xerox I watched it slowly (and then quickly) shrink as the dots on paper market shrank.

In an alternative universe, Xerox is mentioned in the same breath as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

I always thought it was crazy that Xerox had all this ahead-of-the-time technology in its labs, yet when it released a commercial PC, what we got was the 820, a me-too CP/M system that came out just in time for the IBM PC to steamroll it.

Contrast the price of that machine, against what the Alto's successor the Star was costing (my wife's aunt-by-marriage oversaw the first Alto installation at the U.S. government in DC and even the Feds couldn't justify the cost to move from the Alto to Star).

Exactly for having such systems, after Speccy, my group was split between a few folks getting Amigas, using MS-DOS 3.3 on school labs on PC1512, and a couple of years later getting hold of 386 with help of my parents, that I don't appreciate the TUI revival.

We used to dream of better systems, the Xerox dream.

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

Again, this was a business deal. Xerox was allowed to purchase $1M of pre-IPO Apple stock in exchange for the visit. No one was tricked, nothing was stolen, and everyone knew what the deal was.

"Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." - Bill Gates

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

Only on HN is $1,000,000 in stock considered "free."

Compared to the value of that technology to Apple and Microsoft? $1,000,000 is "free" (within rounding error, anyway).

In hindsight, yes, but I’m not sure it looked like it at the time. Surely, it took Apple years to start making ‘real’ money on selling Macs. They needed their Apple 2 line to pay the bills for years.

Also, it wasn’t as much tech (bitmapped displays and computer mice existed elsewhere) as a vision that Apple took from Xerox, and they improved upon it/changed it quite a bit. Examples:

- Alto’s GUI is verb-object, Mac is object-verb

- Alto doesn’t have overlapping windows.

- did Alto have cross-process copy-paste?

- simplifying the mouse down to a single button may have been necessary to gain acceptance. (For comparison, look at https://youtu.be/2Z43y94Dfzk?feature=shared)

Good book on the subject that I recently finished reading:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA

Does a pretty good job at running through PARC's founding and some of the many reasons why none of its amazing technology took off (Spoilers: it wasn't always Xerox interfering!).

> none of its amazing technology took off

The laser printer sure did. In his address to "startup school" at Stanford (marked private now in Youtube for some reason) Alan Kay pointed out that with the laser printer alone, money spent funding PARC earned something like a 250x return on investment for Xerox. (of course he had opinions about how they could have earned a lot more)

The linked book is Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik, and I can second the recommendation.

RIP to the Living Computers: Museum in Seattle… the last place I was ever able to use one of these machines in the flesh.

Previous Discussion:

Xerox Alto Source Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8490156 - Oct 2014 (20 comments)

Somewhat related, curiousmarc has an absolutely brilliant video series from 2016 documenting the restoration of an Alto II:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb58I3ZV67LW3...

Another piece of preserved software from the Alto is Medley Interlisp. This software is still alive today.

https://interlisp.org/

I was looking at the fonts and wondering if there is good documentation on how to read the files and convert them to modern bitmap formats (and, eventually, to non-bitmaps).

I reimplemented Cream for an Apple II educational program and it allowed the user to enter their name using it. I did that with a bit of imagination, the Take-1 Programmer's Toolkit (an awesome tool for the II) and a (Xerox, only now I notice the coincidence) photocopy of a BYTE article covering SmallTalk.

That long-running freelance job is probably why I didn't pursue a career as a hardware engineer and went deep into software.

We had one of these, at my first job. I wasn’t allowed to use it. I wrote most of my stuff in WordStar.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone actually spending a lot of time, writing anything. Most of us were allowed to play with it, but we weren’t really allowed to sit at it, and write docs.

Is it all html directories? Is there a zip or git so you can explore locally?

There's currently no way other than crawling the web site. The HTML and PDF files are intermingled with the original files.

(I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough, and archive.)

I’m having a hard time finding any source. Would somebody please help me?

At the end of the article are two links: https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/index.html https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system...

The first is the actual archive; the second is a "walkthrough" with pointers to various interesting things.

(I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough and archive. Al Kossow was responsible for rescuing the files in the first place.)

What an incredible machine.

Yeah, one of those machines (either the Palo or the Alto) was put on display near the entrance of the late Xerox PARC on Coyote hill (near VA). I was playing with the idea to power it but was told that it doesn't work anymore, at least the power supply is dead and allegedly there were also missing components... I suppose SRI will toss it soon if not already...

Never heard of the Xerox Palo computer and I worked at Xerox for much of the 80s. Xerox made a lot of different machines (mostly but not exclusive in the D-Machine family) but if there was a Palo machine I’d be interested in seeing a photo.

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