The Alto is another example of what Xerox could have been had it not been so wedded to putting dots on paper. In my twenty years at Xerox I watched it slowly (and then quickly) shrink as the dots on paper market shrank.
In an alternative universe, Xerox is mentioned in the same breath as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
I always thought it was crazy that Xerox had all this ahead-of-the-time technology in its labs, yet when it released a commercial PC, what we got was the 820, a me-too CP/M system that came out just in time for the IBM PC to steamroll it.
Contrast the price of that machine, against what the Alto's successor the Star was costing (my wife's aunt-by-marriage oversaw the first Alto installation at the U.S. government in DC and even the Feds couldn't justify the cost to move from the Alto to Star).
Exactly for having such systems, after Speccy, my group was split between a few folks getting Amigas, using MS-DOS 3.3 on school labs on PC1512, and a couple of years later getting hold of 386 with help of my parents, that I don't appreciate the TUI revival.
We used to dream of better systems, the Xerox dream.
Again, this was a business deal. Xerox was allowed to purchase $1M of pre-IPO Apple stock in exchange for the visit. No one was tricked, nothing was stolen, and everyone knew what the deal was.
"Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." - Bill Gates
Does a pretty good job at running through PARC's founding and some of the many reasons why none of its amazing technology took off (Spoilers: it wasn't always Xerox interfering!).
The laser printer sure did. In his address to "startup school" at Stanford (marked private now in Youtube for some reason) Alan Kay pointed out that with the laser printer alone, money spent funding PARC earned something like a 250x return on investment for Xerox. (of course he had opinions about how they could have earned a lot more)
I was looking at the fonts and wondering if there is good documentation on how to read the files and convert them to modern bitmap formats (and, eventually, to non-bitmaps).
I reimplemented Cream for an Apple II educational program and it allowed the user to enter their name using it. I did that with a bit of imagination, the Take-1 Programmer's Toolkit (an awesome tool for the II) and a (Xerox, only now I notice the coincidence) photocopy of a BYTE article covering SmallTalk.
That long-running freelance job is probably why I didn't pursue a career as a hardware engineer and went deep into software.
We had one of these, at my first job. I wasn’t allowed to use it. I wrote most of my stuff in WordStar.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone actually spending a lot of time, writing anything. Most of us were allowed to play with it, but we weren’t really allowed to sit at it, and write docs.
Readit News
In an alternative universe, Xerox is mentioned in the same breath as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
We used to dream of better systems, the Xerox dream.
https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html
Only on HN is $1,000,000 in stock considered "free."
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA
Does a pretty good job at running through PARC's founding and some of the many reasons why none of its amazing technology took off (Spoilers: it wasn't always Xerox interfering!).
The laser printer sure did. In his address to "startup school" at Stanford (marked private now in Youtube for some reason) Alan Kay pointed out that with the laser printer alone, money spent funding PARC earned something like a 250x return on investment for Xerox. (of course he had opinions about how they could have earned a lot more)
Deleted Comment
Xerox Alto Source Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8490156 - Oct 2014 (20 comments)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb58I3ZV67LW3...
https://interlisp.org/
I reimplemented Cream for an Apple II educational program and it allowed the user to enter their name using it. I did that with a bit of imagination, the Take-1 Programmer's Toolkit (an awesome tool for the II) and a (Xerox, only now I notice the coincidence) photocopy of a BYTE article covering SmallTalk.
That long-running freelance job is probably why I didn't pursue a career as a hardware engineer and went deep into software.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone actually spending a lot of time, writing anything. Most of us were allowed to play with it, but we weren’t really allowed to sit at it, and write docs.