Xerox Alto
The Xerox Alto was an early personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI).
It was not a commercial product, but several thousand units were built and were heavily used at PARC and at several universities for many years. The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers in the following decades, notably the Macintosh and the first Sun workstations. It is now very rare and a valuable collector's item.
Architecture
The Alto was first conceptualized in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, and designed primarily by Chuck Thacker. It had 128 (expandable to 512) kB of main memory and a hard disk with a removable 2.5 MB cartridge, all housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator. The Alto's CPU was a very innovative microcoded processor which used microcode for most of the I/O functions rather than hardware. The microcode machine had 16 tasks, one of which executed the normal instruction set (which was rather like a Data General Nova), with the others used for the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. As an example, the bit map display controller was little more than a 16-bit shift register; microcode was used to fetch display refresh data from main memory and put it in the shift register.
Apart from an Ethernet connection, the Alto's only common output device was a bi-level (black and white) CRT display, mounted in a vertical, "portrait" orientation in contrast to the more common horizontal "landscape" orientation. Its input devices were a custom keyboard, a three-button mouse, and an optional 5-key chord keyset. The last two items were borrowed from SRI's On-Line System; while the mouse was an instant success among Alto users, the chord keyset never became popular.
The mouse had three buttons. The earliest mice were mechanical and used two wheels perpendicular to each other. These were soon replaced with ball-type mice, which were invented by Bill English. Later, optical mice were introduced, first using white light and then using IR. The buttons on the early mice were narrow bars arranged top to bottom rather than side to side.
The keyboard was interesting in that each key was represented as a separate bit in a set of registers. This characteristic was used to alter where the Alto would boot from. The keyboard registers were used as the address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems could be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release required more fingers than you could come up with. Nose boots were made obsolete by the "move2keys" program that shifted files on the disk so that a specified key sequence could be used.
A number of other I/O devices were available for the Alto, including a TV 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.
Industrial Design
In 1972, Xerox PARC was seeking a designer to partner with to create the “office of the future,” that would replace the traditional pencil and notepad. Xerox PARC held a design competition and ultimately chose Clement Designlabs to fulfill their industrial design needs, from concept to manufacturing.
The team at Clement Designlabs including Carl J. Clement, Ken Campbell and Fred Stengel was introduced to Douglas Engelbart of SRI, who had produced a breadboard of the future Alto, which was a rudimentary desktop computer. Clement Designlabs designed and produced an initial run of 80 units, working with Tony Ciuffini and Rick Nevinger at Xerox El Segundo, who were responsible for installing the Alto’s electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.
The Alto had “the first detachable keyboard, the first tilt-and-swivel monitor, the first 3-button mouse, and the first compact combination of a garageable mouse, keyboard, and mini-typewriter.” In addition to the original Alto, the Clement Designlabs team also designed other versions of the Alto, including an Alto with a landscape-oriented monitor, “a Japanese Kanji version of the Alto, a portable Alto, [as well as] 9-micrometre IR item-gate touch screen masks for which [the Clement Designlabs team] did the basic optical research and manufacturing, and the first [flat-bed] scanner.”[1]
Software
Early software for the Alto was written in the BCPL programming language, and later in the Mesa programming language, which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula. The Alto keyboard was lacking the underscore key, which had been appropriated for the left-arrow character used in Mesa for the assignment operator. This feature of the Alto keyboard may have been the source for the CamelCase style for compound identifiers. Another feature of the Alto was that it was microcode-programmable by the user.
The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced the concept of the bit block transfer operation, or BitBLT, as the fundamental programming interface to the display. In spite of its small memory size, quite a number of innovative programs were written for the Alto, including the first WYSIWYG document preparation systems Bravo and Gypsy, editors for graphical data (bitmaps, printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, etc.), the first versions of the Smalltalk environment, and one of the first network-based multi-person computer games (Alto Trek by Gene Ball).
Diffusion and evolution
Technically, the Alto was a small minicomputer, but it could be considered a personal computer in the sense that it was used by a single person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframes and other minicomputers of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others[2]
The Alto was never a commercial product, although several thousand were built. Universities, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, and the University of Rochester received donations of Altos including IFS file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines were the inspiration for the ETH Zürich Lilith and Three Rivers Company PERQ workstations, and the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which was eventually marketed by a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems. The Apollo/Domain workstation and Apple Lisa also were heavily influenced by the Alto.
A trip to Xerox PARC by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs in 1979 led to the graphical user interface and mouse being integrated into the Apple Lisa and, later, the first Macintosh[3]. Steve Jobs was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven GUI interface provided by the Alto.
The Xerox Alto was used to design the next influential "D" series of workstations: the Dolphin, Dorado and Dandelion. A network router called Dicentra was also based on this design. Dolphin was a mid-line TTL design originally intended to be the Star workstation while Dorado had a very fast ECL based design. The original architecture for the Dandelion, based on the AMD Am2900 bitslice microprocessor technology, was presented as a paper design called Wildflower and was the low-cost design that became the actual Star workstation.
Xerox and the Alto
Xerox itself was slow to realize the value of the technology that had been developed at PARC. After their unhappy experience with SDS (later XDS) in the late 1960s, the company was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs. So, when the success of IBM's Personal Computer finally pushed Xerox to offer a PC of their own, they pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse.
When Xerox finally decided to commercialize the work of PARC, they chose to use D-series machines as the basis for a high-end workstation product. The Dolphin (Interlisp), Dandelion (MESA), and Dorado or 'D-Series' machines were virtual-memory machines based on the 'Wildflower' architecture described in a paper by Butler Lampson. The Dandelion benchmarked with about the same performance as a VAX 11/750, which cost $100,000 at the time. The Dorado - made from ECL - benchmarked 4 times faster and was competitive with the fastest super minicomputers of the day.
When Xerox finally decided to commercialize the work of PARC, they chose to use the Dolphin as the basis for a high-end workstation product. The Dandelion design became the Xerox 8010, which ran the Xerox Star workstation software; it was the first commercial product to incorporate a GUI, including icons, windows, and folders. However, these expensive workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that appeared in the wake of the first Macintosh.
See also
Further reading
- Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999)
- Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (William Morrow, New York, 1988)
References
Alto User's Handbook, Xerox PARC, September 1979
- ^ “The History of the Xerox Alto”. Carl J. Clement. March, 2002.
- ^ "Personal Computer Milestones". Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute. Retrieved 2006-12-31.
- ^ "PBS Triumph of the Nerds Television Program Transcripts: Part III". PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Retrieved 2007-02-08.