CHM Live | Yesterday’s Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto

[Recorded November 10, 2017] Program 05:22 Bravo Demo with Tom Malloy & Charles Simonyi 22:15 Markup and Draw Demo with Bob Sproull 39:42 Laurel Demo with Doug Brotz 55:15 Smalltalk Demo with Dan Ingalls 01:14:13 Presentation by John Shoch 01:36:28 CHM Alto Restoration Project Video 01:39:55 Q&A How did personal computing start? Many credit Apple and IBM for this radical shift, but in 1973, years before the Apple II and IBM PC, Xerox built the Alto, a computer its makers thought could become the “computer of tomorrow.” The Alto embodied for the first time many of the defining features of personal computing that seem natural now, over forty years later: individual use; interactive, graphical displays; networking; graphical interfaces with overlapping windows and icons; WYSIWYG word processing; browsers; email; and the list goes on. The birthplace of this pioneering machine was Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which assembled a remarkable collection of compute