49-399: The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers , and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse , Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of
98-530: A personal computer in the sense that it is used by one person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframe computers and other minicomputers of the era. It is arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed. More significantly (and perhaps less controversially), it may be considered to be one of the first workstation systems, with successors such as the Apollo workstations and systems by Symbolics (designed to natively run Lisp as
147-543: A writable control store extension and has 128 (expandable to 512) KB of main memory organized in 16-bit words. Mass storage is provided by a hard disk drive that uses a removable 2.5 MB one-platter cartridge ( Diablo Systems , a company Xerox later bought) similar to those used by the IBM 2310 . The base machine and one disk drive are housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator ; one more disk drive can be added via daisy-chaining . Alto both blurs and ignores
196-769: A complete redesign of the Lilith under the Name "Project Oberon" . In 1978, Xerox donated 50 Altos to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Stanford University , Carnegie Mellon University , and the University of Rochester . The National Bureau of Standards 's Institute for Computer Sciences in Gaithersburg, Maryland received one Alto in late 1978 along with Xerox Interim File System (IFS) file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines inspired
245-563: A development environment). In 1976 to 1977, the Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth spent a sabbatical at PARC and was excited by the Alto. Unable to bring back an Alto system to Europe, Wirth decided to build a new system from scratch and he designed with his group the Lilith . It was ready to use around 1980, before Apple released Lisa in 1981 and Macintosh in 1984. Around 1985, Wirth started
294-431: A display of pixels corresponding to the ones and zeros of the memory data. Ethernet is likewise supported by minimal hardware, with a shift register that acts bidirectionally to serialize output words and deserialize input words. Its speed was designed to be 3 Mbit/s because the microcode engine can not go faster and continue to support the video display, disk activity, and memory refresh. Unlike most minicomputers of
343-695: A graphical operating system, and was built on earlier graphical interface designs. It was conceived in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson , inspired by the oN-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart and Dustin Lindberg at SRI International (SRI). Of further influence was the PLATO education system developed at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. The Alto
392-523: A particular location. It has a touch screen, stylus, and handwriting recognition . Xerox designed the similar and larger PARCPad. Both devices were developed around the same time as the Apple Newton . PARC's distinguished researchers include four Turing Award winners: Butler Lampson (1992), Alan Kay (2003), Charles P. Thacker (2009), and Robert Metcalfe (2022). The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award recognized
441-679: A wholly owned subsidiary. In late April of 2023, Xerox announced the donation of the lab to SRI International . In 1969, Goldman talked with George Pake , a physicist specializing in nuclear magnetic resonance and provost of Washington University in St. Louis , about starting a second research center for Xerox. On July 1, 1970, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center opened. Its 3,000-mile distance from Xerox headquarters in Rochester, New York , afforded scientists at
490-656: Is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California . It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman , chief scientist of Xerox Corporation , as a division of Xerox , tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems. Xerox PARC has been foundational to numerous revolutionary computer developments, including laser printing , Ethernet , the modern personal computer , GUI ( graphical user interface ) and desktop paradigm , object-oriented programming , ubiquitous computing , electronic paper , a-Si ( amorphous silicon ) applications,
539-536: Is based mostly on the August 1976 Alto Hardware Manual by Xerox PARC. Alto uses a microcoded design, but unlike many computers, the microcode engine is not hidden from the programmer in a layered design. Applications such as Pinball take advantage of this to accelerate performance. The Alto has a bit-slice arithmetic logic unit (ALU) based on the Texas Instruments 74181 chip, a ROM control store with
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#1732765174738588-475: Is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering"—the others are the Academy's Russ and Gordon Prizes . The Draper Prize is awarded biennially and the winner of each of these prizes receives $ 500,000. The Draper prize is named for Charles Stark Draper , the "father of inertial navigation ", an MIT professor and founder of Draper Laboratory . The NAE website shows that no Draper Prize
637-491: Is the fact that a large number of the personal computers of tomorrow will be designed with knowledge gained from the development of the Alto. After the Alto, PARC developed more powerful workstations (none intended as projects) informally termed "the D-machines": Dandelion (least powerful, but the only to be made a product in one form), Dolphin; Dorado (most powerful; an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) machine); and hybrids like
686-537: The ARPANET . The firm was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs, although many of the philosophies would ship in later products. Byte magazine stated in 1981, It is unlikely that a person outside of the computer-science research community will ever be able to buy an Alto. They are not intended for commercial sale, but rather as development tools for Xerox, and so will not be mass-produced. What makes them worthy of mention
735-639: The Xerox 820 , it pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, a CP/M -based machine with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse. With the help of PARC researchers, Xerox eventually developed the Star , based on the Dandelion workstation, and later the cost-reduced Star, the 6085 office system, based on the Daybreak workstation. These machines, based on
784-521: The computer mouse , and VLSI ( very-large-scale integration ) for semiconductors . Unlike Xerox's existing research laboratory in Rochester, New York, which focused on refining and expanding the company's copier business, Goldman's "Advanced Scientific & Systems Laboratory" aimed to pioneer new technologies in advanced physics, materials science, and computer science applications. In 2002, Xerox spun off Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated as
833-492: The liquid-crystal display (LCD), some major innovations in optical disc technology, and laser printing were actively and successfully introduced by Xerox to the business and consumer markets. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has said that the Xerox graphical interface has notably influenced Microsoft and Apple. Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs said that "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been
882-517: The underscore character, instead having the left-arrow character used in ALGOL 60 and many derivatives for the assignment operator : this peculiarity may have been the source of the CamelCase style for compound identifiers . Altos were also microcode-programmable by users. The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced
931-704: The Alto system in 1984, Smalltalk in 1987, InterLisp in 1992, and the remote procedure call in 1994. Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor , and Thacker received the National Academy of Engineering 's prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2004 for their work on the Alto. Lynn Conway was recognized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her work on VLSI (2023). Xerox has been heavily criticized, particularly by business historians, for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations. Xerox management failed to see
980-879: The Alto's electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2,000 units over the next ten years. Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California , one is on display at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia , and several are in private hands. Running systems are on display at the System Source Computer Museum in Hunt Valley , Maryland . Charles P. Thacker
1029-605: The Alto, including a television camera, the Hy-Type daisywheel printer and a parallel port, although these were quite rare. The Alto could also control external disk drives to act as a file server . This was a common application for the machine. Early software for the Alto was written in the programming language BCPL , and later in Mesa , which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula . The Alto used an early version of ASCII which lacked
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#17327651747381078-434: The Alto. The Xerox Star series was a relative commercial success, but it came too late. The expensive Xerox workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that arose in the wake of the first Macintosh, and Xerox eventually quit the workstation market. 1975–1981 (Alto II) PARC (company) SRI Future Concepts Division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center , PARC and Xerox PARC )
1127-695: The Dandel-Iris. Before the advent of personal computers such as the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) in 1981, the computer market was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared the processing time of the central computer. Through the 1970s, Xerox showed no interest in PARC's work. When Xerox finally entered the PC market with
1176-631: The ETH Zuerich Lilith and Three Rivers Company PERQ workstations, and the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which launched a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems . The Apollo/Domain workstation was heavily influenced by the Alto. Following the acquisition of an Alto, the White House information systems department sought to lead federal computer suppliers in its direction. The Executive Office of
1225-579: The IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." 37°24′10″N 122°08′55″W / 37.40278°N 122.14861°W / 37.40278; -122.14861 Charles Stark Draper Prize The U.S. National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Draper Prize , which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It
1274-557: The President of the United States (EOP) issued a request for proposal for a computer system to replace the aging Office of Management and Budget (OMB) budget system, using Alto-like workstations, connected to an IBM-compatible mainframe. The request was eventually withdrawn because no mainframe producer could supply such a configuration. In December 1979, Apple Computer 's co-founder Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, where he
1323-566: The Wildflower architecture described in a paper by Butler Lampson , incorporated most of the Alto innovations, including the graphical user interface with icons, windows, folders, Ethernet-based local networking, and network-based laser printer services. Xerox only realized its mistake in the early 1980s, after the Macintosh revolutionized the PC market via its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface. Both of these were inspired by
1372-652: The Xerox System Development Department to design the Star workstations. Xerox was slow to realize the value of the technology that had been developed at PARC. The Xerox corporate acquisition of Scientific Data Systems (SDS, later XDS) in the late 1960s had no interest to PARC. PARC built their own emulation of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 named the MAXC. The MAXC was PARC's gateway machine to
1421-400: The boot button, different microcode and operating systems can be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release requires more fingers than the user can articulate. Nose boots were obsoleted by the move2keys program that shifts files on the disk so that a specified key sequence can be used. Several other I/O devices were developed for
1470-567: The computer field was under the leadership of its Computer Science Laboratory manager Bob Taylor , who guided the lab as associate manager from 1970 to 1977, and as manager from 1977 to 1983. Work at PARC since the early 1980s includes advances in ubiquitous computing , aspect-oriented programming , and IPv6 . After three decades as a division of Xerox, PARC was transformed in 2002 into an independent, wholly owned subsidiary company dedicated to developing and maturing advances in science and business concepts. Xerox announced that it would donate
1519-582: The computer prompted the development of the PARC Universal Packet architecture, which is structured much like the modern Internet's architecture. The PARCTab is an experimental mobile computer as an early experiment in Ubiquitous Computing or UbiComp. Its appearance resembles a PDA . Its functionality depends on the user's location, by receiving location-specific information via infrared sensors from gateway nodes installed in
Xerox Alto - Misplaced Pages Continue
1568-428: The computing industry. Many advancements made at the center were not equaled or surpassed for two decades. Xerox PARC has been the inventor and incubator of many elements of modern computing, including: Most of these developments were included in the Alto, which added the computer mouse . These developments unified into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computers use. The integration of Ethernet into
1617-428: The concept of the bit block transfer operation ( bit blit , BitBLT), as the fundamental programming interface to the display. Despite its small memory size, many innovative programs were written for the Alto, including: There was no spreadsheet or database software. The first electronic spreadsheet program, VisiCalc , did not appear until 1979. Technically, the Alto is a small minicomputer, but it could be considered
1666-518: The concepts in developing the Lisa and Macintosh systems. In 1981, Xerox commercialized a line of office computers, the Star , based on concepts from the Alto. A complete office system including several workstations, storage, and a laser printer cost up to $ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 335,000 in 2023). Like the Alto, the Star had little direct impact on the market. The Alto is the first computer with
1715-526: The distinction between functional elements. Rather than a distinct central processing unit with a well-defined electrical interface (such as a system bus ) to storage and peripherals, the Alto ALU interacts directly with hardware interfaces to memory and peripherals, driven by microinstructions that are output from the control store. The microcode machine supports up to 16 cooperative multitasking tasks, each with fixed priority . The emulator task executes
1764-529: The era, Alto does not support a serial terminal for user interface. Apart from an Ethernet connection, the Alto's only common output device is a bi-level (black and white) cathode-ray tube (CRT) display with a tilt-and-swivel base, mounted in portrait orientation rather than the more common "landscape" orientation. Its input devices are a custom detachable keyboard , a three-button mouse , and an optional 5-key chorded keyboard (chord keyset). The last two items had been introduced by SRI's On-Line System and
1813-482: The first computers to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems. The Alto was designed for an operating system based on a GUI, later using the desktop metaphor . The first machines were introduced on March 1, 1973, and in limited production starting one decade before Xerox's designs inspired Apple to release
1862-411: The first mass-market GUI computers. The Alto is contained in a relatively small cabinet and uses a custom central processing unit (CPU) built from multiple SSI and MSI integrated circuits . Each machine cost tens of thousands of dollars. Few were built initially, but by the late 1970s, about 1,000 were in use at various Xerox laboratories, and about another 500 in several universities. Total production
1911-553: The global potential of many of PARC's inventions, but this was mostly a problem with its computing research, a relatively small part of PARC's operations. One notable example of this is the graphical user interface (GUI), initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then sold as the Xerox 8010 Information System workstation (with office software called Star) by the Xerox Systems Development Department. It heavily influenced future system design, but
1960-468: The lab and its related assets to SRI International in April 2023. As part of the deal, Xerox would keep most of the patent rights inside PARC, and benefit from a preferred research agreement with SRI/PARC. On January 18, 2024, SRI announced the research group from the PARC will become its Future Concepts division. PARC's developments in information technology served for a long time as standards for much of
2009-518: The mouse was an instant success among Alto users, but the chord keyset never became popular. In the early mice, the buttons are three narrow bars, arranged top to bottom rather than side to side; they were named after their colors in the documentation. The motion is sensed by two perpendicular wheels. These were soon replaced with a ball-type mouse, which was invented by Ronald E. Rider and developed by Bill English . These are photo-mechanical mice, first using white light, and then infrared (IR), to count
Xerox Alto - Misplaced Pages Continue
2058-624: The new lab great freedom in their work, but it increased the difficulty of persuading management of the promise of some of their greatest achievements. In its early years, PARC's West Coast location helped it hire many employees of the nearby SRI Augmentation Research Center (ARC) as that facility's funding began reducing from DARPA , NASA , and the U.S. Air Force . By leasing land at Stanford Research Park , it encouraged Stanford University graduate students to be involved in PARC research projects and PARC scientists to collaborate with academic seminars and projects. Much of PARC's early success in
2107-405: The normal instruction set to which most applications are written; that instruction set is similar to a Data General Nova . Other tasks serve the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. For example, the bitmap display controller is little more than a 16- bit shift register ; microcode moves display refresh data from main memory to the shift register, which serializes it into
2156-404: The rotations of wheels inside the mouse. Each key on the Alto keyboard is represented as a separate bit in a set of memory locations. As a result, it is possible to read multiple key presses concurrently . This trait can be used to alter from where on the disk the Alto boots. The keyboard value is used as the sector address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing
2205-514: Was about 2,000 systems. The Alto became well known in Silicon Valley and its GUI was increasingly seen as the future of computing. In 1979, Steve Jobs arranged a visit to Xerox PARC, during which Apple Computer personnel received demonstrations of Xerox technology in exchange for Xerox being able to purchase stock options in Apple. After two visits to see the Alto, Apple engineers used
2254-574: Was awarded the 2009 Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery on March 9, 2010, for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay , Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto. On October 21, 2014, Xerox Alto's source code and other resources were released from the Computer History Museum. The following description
2303-552: Was deemed a failure because Xerox only sold about 25,000 units of the computer. A small group from PARC led by David Liddle and Charles Irby formed Metaphor Computer Systems . Metaphor Computer Systems extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to IBM . Several GUI engineers left to join Apple Computer to work on Lisa and Macintosh . Technologies pioneered by its materials scientists such as
2352-600: Was designed mostly by Charles P. Thacker . Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Xerox's Special Programs Group in El Segundo , whose team included program manager Doug Stewart, operations manager Abbey Silverstone , and industrial designer Bob Nishimura. An initial run of 30 units was produced by the Special Programs Group, working with John Ellenby at PARC and Stewart and Silverstone at El Segundo, who were responsible for re-designing
2401-611: Was shown the Smalltalk -76 object-oriented programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG , mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto. At the time, he didn't recognize the significance of the first two, but was excited by the last one. The GUI was promptly integrating into Apple's products, first into the Lisa and then in the Macintosh , and Jobs recruited several key researchers from PARC. In 1980-1981, Altos were used by engineers at PARC and at
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