A computer designed to be used with a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer could sound like any computer you’ve used, all made possible by a graphical user interface used on the Xerox Alto. Tom explores its history.
Featuring Tom Merritt.
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Episode transcript:
“We talked about this idea of new interaction and new interface. And that really comes together in the form factor we call Tablet PC.”
In 2001, Microsoft began promoting its vision for tablet PCs. Five years later, it had pivoted to the UltraMobile PC. But people weren’t buying.
“Does the world want this mythical keyboard-less tablet computer? What do you think? I don’t think that market has proven yet that there is a need for this type of device.”
By 2009, reporters Rafe Needleman and Ryan Block were saying it was pretty clear people didn’t want tablets.
And then…
“We’d like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it the iPad.”
Charles Thacker must have had a familiar feeling as he watched Apple once again make success out of something he had blazed the trail for.
You see, Thacker designed the hardware for the Tablet PC.
But that wasn’t the first time. Oh no.
Thacker also designed the Xerox Alto back in 1972. That was a desktop machine with a graphical user interface that used a mouse and keyboard. But Thacker’s design would not popularize that style of computer. Apple would. With the Mac.
But just like Thacker’s Tablet PC design, the Alto laid the groundwork. Even more so.
Let’s help you know a little more about the Xerox Alto.
Alan Kay had the idea for the Dynabook, a tablet-like computer for education. He had Adele Goldberg working on the interface, but he needed hardware. Kay worked at Xerox PARC, the Wild West research arm of buttoned-up Xerox, located out in Palo Alto, California.
Charles Thacker also worked there. He was one of a group of hardware engineers, including Butler Lampson, who had tried to launch the Berkeley Computer Corporation. When that didn’t work, they became the core technologists at PARC.
Kay needed hardware designed, and Thacker and Lampson designed hardware, so in September 1972, they asked him if they could build him a computer. Kay not only said yes but gave them part of his budget.
Thacker was motivated. The story goes that a Xerox exec had told Thacker it took 18 months to develop major hardware systems, and Thacker bet him he could do it in three months. Thacker lost the bet. It took him four months and nine days.
On December 19, 1972, Lampson put out a memo. While Kay had needed about 15-20 Dynabooks for his research, the Alto Thacker had designed could do much more. So Lampson suggested making as many as 30 of them.
The memo laid out Thacker’s design. Keep in mind this is 1972. Nixon had just got re-elected and the last Apollo moon mission was underway. Ma Bell charged more than $2 for a five-minute call from Palo Alto to Xerox HQ in New York.
The Xerox Alto in 1972 had:
– A mouse
– A keyboard
– A vertical monitor
– A 10 Megabyte disk drive
– A printer
And was estimated to cost $10,500 to make.
“For most problems it can deliver better performance to the user than a time-share,” and “Alto is cheap enough that we can buy one for each member of CSL, if that should prove desirable.”
It would also let them test theories about whether it was best to store user files centrally or locally. He wrote, “We can very easily put in an Aloha-like point-to-point packet network between Altos, using a coax as the ether.” He’s talking about ethernet.
He only vaguely alluded to the part of the Alto that would catch everyone’s eye, including Steve Jobs, the graphical user interface.
They built the 30 and kept building. Everybody wanted one. Workers supposedly volunteered to help assemble them to speed up the chance they would get one.
The first Xerox Altos were introduced on March 1, 1973. The Alto mostly consisted of a cabinet housing the CPU that was about the size of a mini-fridge. That could sit under a desk and connect to the vertical screen, keyboard, mouse, and at first, a five-button chorded keyboard device.
The actual specs differed a bit from the design. It had 128 KB of memory, and 2.5 MB removable cartridge hard drives. A compromise on the 10 MB design. You could swap these in and out. The processor was a TI 74181, and the CPU employed microcode instead of hardware for the input-output activities, an unusual approach for the time. That meant in addition to the keyboard you could also have a TV camera and a daisy wheel printer. And of course, taking inspiration from Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, it had a mouse.
Among its apps were a couple of the first WYSIWYG word processors, Bravo and Gypsy, FTP and chat, Markup and Draw bitmap editors for painting and graphics making, and of course the GUI, powered by Smalltalk.
The Altos were mostly used in Xerox, and mostly at PARC. Some were in use at universities, and by 1978, there was one in the White House, the US House of Representatives, Atlantic Richfield, and Xerox Corporate Sales in Santa Clara, California.
In December 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox. Adele Goldberg famously refused to demonstrate Smalltalk for fear of Apple stealing their trade secrets. But she was ordered to, and she did.
The Jobs visit has been mythologized, but a few facts may get in the way.
Apple’s Lisa (and Macintosh, therefore) were already under development when Jobs visited Xerox PARC. He didn’t suddenly get the idea by seeing the Alto and then run back and start the Mac project. Alto had been kicking around Silicon Valley for six years at this point, and engineers hang out and talk at bars and elsewhere. So Apple could have had the idea for bitmapped graphics interfaces all on its own. And the mouse had been shown by Engelbart to everyone who would watch in 1968.
Jobs’ visit was also a quid pro quo. Xerox was investing in Apple, so agreed to show off what they were working on. Jobs wasn’t hoodwinking Xerox into handing him their trade secrets; Xerox was sharing intel with a partner.
So why did Apple seem to most as if it had invented the GUI, the mouse, and everything? Why wasn’t the Xerox Alto the computer everyone bought in the 1980s? Why aren’t we excited to see the announcement of the new Altos, instead of the new Macs?
Well, it tried. It commercialized a line of office computers called the Xerox Star in 1981, based on the Alto platform. That was two years before the Apple Lisa was released in January 1983. The Star was a little more expensive. $100,000 for several workstations and a laser printer.
Xerox didn’t sell personal computers. It didn’t sell to individuals. It sold to offices. It doesn’t appear that it ignored the Alto or its advancements as much as it didn’t know how to fit it into its business model. And not only was the Alto outside of its experience as a company, it was too early.
Xerox also didn’t have a network of developers like Apple and Microsoft did. There were no hobbyist fans of the Xerox Alto.
And so after making around 2,000 of them, the PARC team moved on to other things. Goldberg and Smalltalk spun out into a separate subsidiary. Several engineers went to work at Apple. Many went on to found Adobe.
Thacker joined DEC in 1983 and founded its Systems Research Center. He stayed there until 1997 when he joined Microsoft to help establish its Microsoft Research Cambridge, and of course, design hardware for the Tablet PC.
And the Xerox Alto belongs in a museum. Several are on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and elsewhere around the US.
In 2004, the US Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to Thacker, Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor.
I hope when you see that desktop full of icons and you click to open a file from your hard drive, you spare a thought for Charles Thacker and the team at Xerox PARC all those years ago.
In other words, I hope you know a little more about the Xerox Alto.