[HN Gopher] Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)
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Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 111 points
Date : 2025-01-31 02:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| What an incredible machine.
| NaOH wrote:
| Previous Discussion:
|
| _Xerox Alto Source Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8490156 - Oct 2014 (20
| comments)
| major4x wrote:
| Yeah, one of those machines (either the Palo or the Alto) was put
| on display near the entrance of the late Xerox PARC on Coyote
| hill (near VA). I was playing with the idea to power it but was
| told that it doesn't work anymore, at least the power supply is
| dead and allegedly there were also missing components... I
| suppose SRI will toss it soon if not already...
| ellisd wrote:
| RIP to the Living Computers: Museum in Seattle... the last place
| I was ever able to use one of these machines in the flesh.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Another piece of preserved software from the Alto is Medley
| Interlisp. This software is still alive today.
|
| https://interlisp.org/
| TomMasz wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was
| sure _nice_ of Xerox to provide all that free technology for
| Apple and Microsoft. "
| ssrc wrote:
| "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
|
| https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html
| turnsout wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It
| was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology
| for Apple and Microsoft."_
|
| Only on HN is $1,000,000 in stock considered "free."
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Compared to the _value_ of that technology to Apple and
| Microsoft? $1,000,000 _is_ "free" (within rounding error,
| anyway).
| Someone wrote:
| In hindsight, yes, but I'm not sure it looked like it at
| the time. Surely, it took Apple years to start making
| 'real' money on selling Macs. They needed their Apple 2
| line to pay the bills for years.
|
| Also, it wasn't as much tech (bitmapped displays and
| computer mice existed elsewhere) as a vision that Apple
| took from Xerox, and they improved upon it/changed it
| quite a bit. Examples:
|
| - Alto's GUI is verb-object, Mac is object-verb
|
| - Alto doesn't have overlapping windows.
|
| - did Alto have cross-process copy-paste?
|
| - simplifying the mouse down to a single button may have
| been necessary to gain acceptance. (For comparison, look
| at https://youtu.be/2Z43y94Dfzk?feature=shared)
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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).
| vkoskiv wrote:
| Somewhat related, curiousmarc has an absolutely brilliant video
| series from 2016 documenting the restoration of an Alto II:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb58I3ZV67LW3...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Good book on the subject that I recently finished reading:
|
| 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!).
| jetrink wrote:
| The linked book is Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the
| Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik, and I can
| second the recommendation.
| justin66 wrote:
| > none of its amazing technology took off
|
| 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)
| sixothree wrote:
| Is it all html directories? Is there a zip or git so you can
| explore locally?
| pmcjones wrote:
| There's currently no way other than crawling the web site. The
| HTML and PDF files are intermingled with the original files.
|
| (I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough, and archive.)
| f1shy wrote:
| I'm having a hard time finding any source. Would somebody please
| help me?
| pmcjones wrote:
| At the end of the article are two links:
| https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/index.html
| https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system...
|
| The first is the actual archive; the second is a "walkthrough"
| with pointers to various interesting things.
|
| (I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough and archive. Al
| Kossow was responsible for rescuing the files in the first
| place.)
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