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mendax [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has released another foundational piece of software to the world at large: some of the code that gave the world the Xerox Alto computer, which among other things helped inspire a couple of young garage developers, Steves Jobs and Wozniak.

For those who are not familiar with this groundbreaking development in the history of computer science, here [youtube.com] are [youtube.com] some [youtube.com] YouTube videos [youtube.com] (sorry about the Japanese in some of them).

All the elements of modern personal computing are present in the Alto, yet they were invented in the early- to mid-1970's.

To the modern eye, the Alto looks odd – mostly because of the portrait orientation of its screen – but it represents Silicon Valley legend and was the first shot at making the UI visual rather than text. Want to draw things using a mouse? Check. Want a desktop metaphor for the screen? Ditto. WYSIWYG word processor? Ditto-ditto.

Original Submission