Fifty Years After Xerox PARC, the Malleable Computer Exists

> Alan Kay‘s group at Xerox PARC built Smalltalk and the machine it lived on, the Alto. Everyone knows what we took from PARC: the mouse, the windows, the bitmapped display, the desktop metaphor.

Not quite. Kay’s group built Smalltalk and used Alto machines, but the Alto was a Computer Science Laboratory project (not Kay's group): Butler Lampson and Charles Thacker designed the Alto as a personal distributed-computing system. Lampson, with Robert Taylor and Charles Thacker, were even receipients of the ACM Software System Award for conceiving and guiding the Alto system. Engelbart’s SRI group demonstrated a mouse, windows, collaborative document work, and more already in 1968. PARC itself supported multiple, substantially different programming environments: Smalltalk, Cedar/Mesa, and Interlisp, rather than representing a single uniform “Alto idea.”

Open system + AI colleague + AI-aware editor = the malleable computer Xerox PARC promised fifty years ago. Smalltalk bet the missing piece was a friendlier language; it was a colleague.