XEROX ALTO - First workstation with Windows mouse & network

[superviewer]

It was a deal (although not very precise) between the two companies and Woz had nothing to do with it. The guy in this vid ought to know. Apple owes the inventors credit, if any. Sure the paradigme was there but drag and drop, the pull down menu, clipping keys (cut, copy, paste, undo), movable overlapping windows comes from Mac OS, and computers without an apple key ended up using the ctrl key for this action instead. Like anyone Xerox PARC took great ideas to the next level.

[ThePrivateJoker]

Oh. So this is who Steve stole the UI from...

[gwgn02]

Apple owes Xerox some credit. 

[EvilMaxWar]

Xerox, une christ de bonne machine!

[enduro250x]

i used to play with that computer every night when I worked at PARc in 1983,

I knew back then they needed to market it. you should have seen the mainframe room in building 32. Hope parc goes on to make many more advances

[Svettjodd]

Please, don't even try to lie your ass out of this.., you wrote "a simple load-store instruction set"...

You continue to produce nonsens. Sorry, I does not work on me. I happen to have detailed knowledge of the 6502 (and others) since almost 30 years - at several levels - you obviously do not.

(If you were only the slightest initiated, you would at least know that the words used are schematics, datasheets, pinouts etc, not "technical diagram" or "signal tapping".)

And don't call me stupid.

[deba94]

gooeys!

which we now call icons

[hubergeek]

Very interesting, thnx for showing this video!

[Metroid225]

The base factor that Apple failed in their accusations was that Windows, as low-tech as it was, actually had an optimized I/O system for memory, peripherals, RAM and ROM that was actually better than Apple's OS. Apple's operating system had to jump through execution loops to access the bus because of an internal write error: Something that already has a signal going to it could not be written to.

That's why Windows took off. If not, it'd be just another OS.

[Metroid225]

And onto my second rambling.

The software Bill wrote was mediocre at the time, but Apple got tough and decided that they could get some money off of a small company. Accusations flooding through to Microsoft failed, because of the root assembly programming that differed from Mac's. This doesn't mean it's better, just different.

Nowadays, the Macs have been based on a strict set of PowerPC chips. This is bad because of a low-support for third party PPC apps for the architecture.

[Metroid225]

The Mac and modern day PCs share a lot in common. More than you might think...

The original Apple and Apple 2 were based on a 6502 microprocessor with a simple load-store instruction set and something resembling draw routines for a monitor output that was built in. They moved onto newer processors, but their roots stay the same: All Macs are PCs, and all PCs are Macs.

As for software, that's the difference. More in the post rivaling mine.

[Svettjodd]

@Metroid225 The 6502 was certainly no load-store machine. And the rest of your "lectures" makes no sense either - sorry.

[Metroid225]

@Svettjodd ... The 6502 was a load/store machine. What're you talking about? And it was a rambling, not a lecture.

Stop being stupid, stupid. :)

P.S:

LDA #$FA

STA $0FFE

^ Load and store instruction set in action.

[Svettjodd]

@Metroid225 Yes, the 6502 has load and store instructions, like any other CPU... However, the 6502 also has arithmetic instructions working directly om memory operands, unlike RISC and load/store architectures.

If the 6502 was a load/store machine just because it has load/store instructions, then the Z80, 68000 and 8086 (and most other CPUs) would be load/store machines as well.

And don't call me stupid stupid.

[Metroid225]

@Svettjodd From what I interpreted, you were saying that the 6502 didn't have any load/store instructions at all.

The BASIS of moving data back and forth defines a load/store instruction set. This is what the 6502 has as a basis for data manipulation.

I never said it was a load/store machine.

P.S: Try looking at a technical diagram or signal-tapping a 6502 sometime. You'll find that the internals work similar to, what else, a load/store machine, only on a much more generalized level.

Stupid.

[Effortless94]

Windows 1.0, not Windows 95.

[jimwg1]

The Apple "stole" Xerox's idea notion is a misnomer. After PARC folks saw the NYC HQ honchos were clueless of taking their Alto office technology anywhere, they might've well been inclined to "leak" the fruits of their sweat and toil for someone else to fulfill than see it die on the vine from incompetence (echoes of Amiga). That Apple was slipped into PARC after the NYC visit -- and that nothing leaked about Alto before hints such. A similar situation occurred at Grumman where Dad worked..

[rosaPokemon]

This machine is so epic, it had pretty much the same GUI and work flow as we know today.

[0mriphone0]

ms doesn't steal the gui from apple, they trade it - the gui from apple and office from ms

[avatarelite]

Not really they took the gui from apple by cooperate with apple against IBM. Apple gave microsoft the first Mac computer. They investigated the computer and reversed engineered it. Apple stole it from Xerox for their Apple Lisa.

[RicardoR5]

Lisa also had a mouse, a full single-page display, and Ethernet links when jobs visited the xerox palo alto facilities, but what drove his mind crazy was indeed the smalltalk, Chuck Thacker didn't sellout, but 100,000 shares of Apple stock made the trick :P

[sundhaug92]

Atleast one of the MS employees asked about many details of the Mac OS.

[avcomth]

It looks pathetic nowadays, but you can still find them at banks where they're used at the teller's terminal to access the COBOL mainframe.

[chargerrt06]

love it, very imformal. Windows will always be better then mac

[atluschooty]

wow cool!!!

[flyppster]

Go see the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley; it was a made for TV movie. Like the guy said, I'm not sure if there's truth to the story, but it makes a pretty damn good movie. It starred Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates.

[djsmithy]

A lot of it was true,

but for the best documentary on the rise of computers, you should see Triumph Of The Nerds.

[Revenge1986]

Pretty cool

=)

[jt3534]

Pretty effing cool.

[aaronp01]

uh...except that they put it on the lisa before they put it on the mac,so not entirely correct there

[m9078jk3]

I still have a Scientific American magazine from September 1977 that has quite a large article about this Xerox Alto Workstation and it's amazing features.The article is by Alan Kay.

[itsadeadmansparty]

isnt it true that alto source code was purchased by apple inc at this meeting or can a xerox employee say here that it was just a meeting to expo alto

[lolokoperro]

Can I run visto on those ?

[lolokoperro]

can I run vista on those?

[shadyman2000]

He is forgetting Windows 3.0 and 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which many Corps went to at the time. Supporting the TCP/IP and IPX/SPX stack as apposed to the NetBUIE crap. W95 came way later in the game and had registries rather than those .ini .x86 configuration files. I remember those days. Windows went from copying IBM DOS to copying Mac who copied Xerox. Those were the simple days.

[Scooby92]

the parts alone cost $10,000

[freakmatador]

That computer has got to cost a fortune. Priceless collection item.

[darijo203]

lol..I love the mouse!