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Comment by TomMasz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

"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

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.

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)

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