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Xerox Alto

Xerox Alto

Image creditJoho345
Public domain ↗

Xerox Alto

Year
1973
Creator
Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Taylor and Xerox PARC researchers
Company
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Location
Palo Alto, California

Description

The Alto is a personal workstation from Xerox PARC with a bitmapped screen of 606 by 808 pixels, a keyboard, and a mouse. Xerox made more than 1,000 Altos for its own staff and for universities, but it never sold the Alto as a product.

Importance

The Alto put windows, graphics, editors that show a page as it will print, email, and Ethernet into one working machine. Its design used ideas from the NLS system of Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and it printed on the laser printer that PARC also invented. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and 3Com later used ideas from the Alto in their products.

Interesting fact

The Alto software included Alto Trek, one of the first multiplayer video games that people played over a network.

Sources

  1. Xerox Alto Source Code (Paul McJones) ↗Computer History Museum · 2014-10-21
  2. Milestones: The Xerox Alto Establishes Personal Networked Computing, 1972-1983 ↗IEEE, Engineering and Technology History Wiki · 2024-05-17
  3. Xerox Alto ↗Wikipedia