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AnonTechie (2275)
Journal of AnonTechie (2275)
50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World
I’m sitting in front of a computer, looking at its graphical user interface with overlapping windows on a high-resolution screen. I interact with the computer by pointing and clicking with a mouse and typing on a keyboard. I’m using a word processor with the core features and functions of Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or LibreOffice’s Writer, along with an email client that could be mistaken for a simplified version of Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, or Mozilla Thunderbird. This computer runs other software, written using object-oriented programming, just like the popular programming languages Python, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and R. Its networking capabilities can link me to other computers and to high-quality laser printers.
You are probably thinking, “So what? My computer has all that too.” But the computer in front of me is not today’s MacBook, ThinkPad, or Surface computer. Rather, it’s half-century-old hardware running software of the same vintage, meticulously restored and in operation at the Computer History Museum’s archive center. Despite its age, using it feels so familiar and natural that it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate just how extraordinary, how different it was when it first appeared.
I’m talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant’s newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 01, @09:36PM (8 children)
There is a book: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
I was an Apple fanboy in 1982 soon to become a Mac fanboy. I never saw the Alto but I remember the stories well.
As I have heard it, Steve Jobs managed to get a tour and demo of these crown jewels -- over the objections of the people developing this -- without a non disclosure agreement. So much to their displeasure, they showed Apple people everything.
Xerox management simply had no idea what they had. Too focused on Copiers. Just as in 1995 Microsoft was too focused on desktop PCs and Bill Gates famously said that the Internet was just a fad. Soon to realize it was a major change in the industry, Microsoft rapidly embraced the net. It is amusing to look at the original registration dates for the domain names apple.com and microsoft.com for additional insight. Or like in 2007 when Ballmer completely missed the significance of the iPhone -- too focused on desktop PCs. Microsoft missed the mobile device and tablet revolution taking years to play catch up.
Xerox could have owned desktop publishing. It was 1985 when Apple introduced the LawerWriter which changed everything. Amusingly, for several years the LawerWriter printer was actually the most powerful computer that Apple made by a fair stretch.
Both Apple and Microsoft both made additional contributions to the original GUI.
Alto would not repaint the "damage" left behind when you would move a window. You had to give a command to make that happen. On Lisa and Mac, this was accomplished because QuickDraw was so fast, and it was easy to calculate exactly the damaged pixels using "Regions" which were arbitrary "sets" of pixels. When Bill Atkinson was working on QuickDraw he assumed it would be necessary to implement this to repaint the damaged areas from moving windows. He did not realize that the Alto did not do this. Alto developers asked how he did this so fast, or so the story goes.
Apple added other original ideas, such as the pull down menus from a top of screen menu bar. Having the menu bar at top of screen made it very easy to just SLAM the mouse pointer to top of screen and click with minimal effort. That lesson was lost on Microsoft who attached menu bars to windows, and below the title bar of the window. I think Apple contributed several ideas in their improvements to dialog boxes.
There was one fantastic idea that Microsoft contributed to the concept of GUIs. The concept of "the focus". There is exactly one focus. It can be moved. Even with only the keyboard. When I first used Windows 3.1, I realized that it was possible to operate it without touching the mouse. The focus could be moved using only the keyboard. On Mac, you could tab between text boxes, but that wasn't the same as "the focus". Microsoft's focus could move to any and every type of control. Buttons. Drop down menus. The menu bar. Window controls like minimize, maximize, close. Anything. Somewhere along the way, Microsoft lost sight of this and it has been a long time since you could run Windows using just the keyboard. Although applications like Paint would naturally require the mouse. But not Word or Excel at that time.
I also seem to remember that some key Xerox people ended up at Apple.
Those were very very fun days and I remember them well. I think the entire period from the 80s and 90s were amazingly fun and progress was happening fast.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02, @01:28AM (2 children)
Don't see that much desktop publishing nowadays though. So perhaps Xerox management was kind of right about the future of that? 😉
So delaying the progress of stuff like the Alto may have kept profits up for Xerox for more decades?
If it was about progress sure but we actually haven't that much progress in computing since. I don't have an affordable AR/VR rig with multiple virtual screens yet, while in theory my smartphone is smart enough to assist me it's been made more to spy on me than to assist me. Google keeps moving Android towards Apple's locked down walled garden.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday March 02, @03:42PM
Yes, forty years later.
However from the mid 80s to at least 2000, desktop publishing was a hugely profitable thing. I would say that desktop publishing spurred the development of highly inexpensive high resolution printers, and also color printers affordable for consumer use. Without desktop publishing, the only trend in printers would have been quieter dot matrix printers.
Furthermore, desktop publishing resulted in, or at the very least was highly instrumental in the merger of office copiers, scanners and printers (and fax) into single high quality, high speed units. Without the ability to generate high quality pages from a computer, there would never have been a need to turn office copiers into also printer output devices.
Uh, no. Xerox could have profited immensely from the years of desktop publishing. They put off that profit forever. Or until they saw the ship had already sailed. Not to mention Xerox could have, if they had the vision, been what Apple was . . . the long time leader in desktop GUI systems.
Imaging if Xerox management had to vision to build a bigger more powerful but compatible IBM PC clone and endow it with a powerful GUI OS that could still run PC programs. It might have been a very expensive PC, but businesses would have bought it for the benefits that come with it. I know this because I was in a business that sold expensive systems that customers would buy simply because of the software benefits alone and the cost savings created by the software on those systems.
A HUGE amount of progress has occurred in computing since the Alto and early Lisa and Macintosh. Computers got much faster and much greater memory. Desktop publishing can be at least partially attributed to the demand for more powerful systems. Apple led the way in multimedia computers with its first clunky CD-ROM drives, with QuickTime software, "plug and play" SCSI making it very easy to add drives. PCs and Windows also grew these features into their system, but it was even clunkier at first. Graphics systems became more powerful. 3D modelling and rendering software on the desktop became a real thing. We eventually evolved a universal printed document format, the PDF.
And that, the PDF format, begins to finally at long last usher in the long predicted, but never delivered "paperless office". Yes, today we now have the paperless office. I rarely use paper. Everything is online. Documents exchanged by email in universal formats. Etc. But it sure took a long time. During the couple decades of "desktop publishing" we printed more paper than ever much to the chagrin of those predicting the paperless office.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Wednesday March 08, @03:19AM
There's plenty of desktop publishing going on, it's just that it became ubiquitous and merged with word processing to the point we no longer see it as anything special.
We do have a problem with corporations trying to use our own tech more against us than for us. But still, remember how amazing we thought it would be when Captain Kirk asked the computer a question and got a verbal answer? Or even when Adama spoke into a microphone and the transcript appeared on his screen?
My phone (and probably yours too) does that. So I would say plenty of social progress but a fair bit of social backsliding.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02, @01:38AM (3 children)
Yeah, I remember using that. I think Microsoft introduced the taskbar and "recent items" too.
But seems like the ones with a clue at Microsoft have either retired or are playing around at Microsoft Research with other stuff now.
We're left with those who produced Windows 8 to 10 and that abomination called Windows 11.
And nowadays you need to click on 3 dots or 3 dashes or right click a special spot or whatever else some idiot thought up... Even on a desktop UI. Discoverability has gone way down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02, @03:55AM (2 children)
That one could incredibly easily move the menu bar to the top of the screen in even the earliest Win95 betas, shouldn't get in the way of his rant.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 02, @03:44PM (1 child)
My rant was that you didn't need to use micro-motor skills to get to the menu bar. On Windows you did need to exercise micro motor skills to position the pointer at the menu bar.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @09:41AM
Speaking of micro-motor skills Apple initially required people to press the mouse button, hold it down, drag the mouse and only release the button when over the desired item.
Apple also required the learning of "double-clicking".
From my observation such stuff was a lot more difficult for normal folk than having menus in different places.
Microsoft Windows didn't require that (at least the later versions that I used). You could just click on the menu then it stays open. Then click again to select the item.
On Windows you could also right click to open if double clicking was too hard (some people have accessibility issues).
Of course now with Windows 10, there are bugs with focus and with double clicking to open/launch stuff. Never had such problems with Windows 7.
I really doubt things will get better with Windows 11.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04, @10:20PM
> I never saw the Alto
I did, c.1981. Oddly enough this Alto sat in the corner of the lab and was rarely used. The hot shit programmers all used the Symbolics Lisp Machines, of which the lab had at least a half dozen, networked to a DEC VAX as the network server.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 04, @06:01PM
You can get a feel for the left side mouse scroll bar where you click the line you want and it scrolls there in plan9port's sam & acme or deadpixi's standalone fork. The latter also supports mouse wheel scrolling, dragging and chording (copy-pasting by combinations of middle + left or middle + right mouse button clicks) so you're getting the best of all worlds. Sadly, no LSP or text highlighters support means no one really uses it for long.
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