Lmst

The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

https://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-rewriting.html

#HackerNews #XeroxAlto #Smalltalk #GUI #Innovation #Computing #History

Using the mouse-driven graphical user interface of a personal computer to write a document with a WYSIWYG word processor, check new messages with an email client, and create an organization chart with a drawing program. Just an ordinary day at Xerox PARC in 1978. When email spam was apparently already a thing.

The demo features the Alto workstation and the Bravo word processor. You can hear the noise of the hard disk.

https://archive.org/details/Xerox_Palo_Alto_Demo_August_1978

#retrocomputing #Xerox #XeroxAlto

Why am I so fascinated by such old machines and their presentation? 😍

#RetroComputing #RetroComputer #XeroxAlto #Smalltalk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w

How the developers of Bravo at Xerox PARC overcame the limitations of Alto to design the first WYSIWYG editor and make it run efficiently.

http://billverplank.com/CiiD/Bravo-Newman.pdf

#XeroxAlto #XeroxPARC #retrocomputing

Xerox sin duda, marcó la pauta. De hecho utilizaron esta tecnología no comercial para crear el procesador de documentos Xerox 8010 también conocido como "Xerox Star".
Todo esto movió a Steve Jobs cuando visitó PARC para crear un sistema aún más robusto donde agrego menús desplegables, arrastrar y soltar, barras de menú y el "Copy+Paste" moderno del cual hablaremos posteriormente
📸: ToastyTech
#retrocomputingmx #historiadelgui #xeroxalto

Sin duda el Xerox Alto era un ordenador muy avanzado para la época, que se usaba para la investigación sobre la interacción humano-tecnológica y el uso de ordenadores.
Inclusive había entornos de programación para esta máquina, como el BCPL y MESA, lenguaje de bajo nivel que podían usar el microcódigo del CPU.
Sin olvidar el SmallTalk y Lisp de alto nivel, interactivos y orientado a objetos.

#retrocomputingmx #historiadelgui #xeroxalto

Mas fotos del Xerox Alto:
Neptune file Manager
Bravo, el editor de textos WYSIWYG
Draw, programa de dibujo bitmap (los objetos eran definidos y manipulables de forma individual)
MazeWar, juego de años antes al Doom, en 3D, jugable por red, multijugador, portado al Alto.
Continuará...
📸: ToastyTech
#retrocomputingmx #historiadelgui #xeroxalto

El SO tenia un simbolo de sistema, si, como lo escuchas. El ambiente de comando se llamaba Alto Executive y el ambiente similar para ejecutar programas a través de la red sera el Net Executive.
Ya entrado al GUI, se deplegaba el "Neptune Directory Editor" que usaba el ratón, botones gráficos y lista de archivos.
Continua...
#retrocomputingmx #historiadelgui #xeroxalto

Platicamos sobre que el ordenador Xerox Alto había sido la primera en reunir los elementos clásicos de la moderna interfaz gráfico de usuario.
Aunque fue construido para la investigación, Xerox donó varias a Universidades y centros de R&D.
El hardware de la Xerox Alto de 1973 consistia de procesador de 16 bits, una pantalla monocromática de 606x808 px, ratón de 3 botones, teclado de 82 teclas, 5 discos extraíbles de 2.5 Mb y 512Kb de memoria.

#retrocomputingmx #historiadelgui #xeroxalto

Apple o Microsoft no fueron los primeros en contar con un SO basado en cursor, apuntar y clic y un sistema de organización de archivos basado en ventanas, con soporte de red via modem o ethernet. Que distinta hubiera diso la historia de no ser por los "cabezas de tóner"

#retrocomputingmx #GuiSystem #xeroxalto #DouglasEngelbart

La historia de Xerox Alto 😎 En 1973 se desarrolló la Xerox Alto, una computadora que incorporó dos novedades nunca antes vistas hasta ese momento: la interfaz gráfica de usuario y el concepto de escritorio. #xerox #xeroxalto #historia #retrocomputing homecomputer.com.ar/2020/11/10/1...

jdersch/Contralto2: Xerox Alto Emulator

#Emulator #Xerox #XeroxAlto #Retrocomputing
https://github.com/jdersch/Contralto2

It’s not every day I get to play with a Xerox Alto thanks to the people at The Computer Museum in Maryland! I suck at Missile Command BTW. Great exhibit space and worth a visit! #RetroComputing #XeroxAlto

museum.syssrc.com

TIL why the default Ethernet MTU is 1500!

#Ethernet #ComputerHistory #XeroxAlto #XeroxPARC
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik (1999)

Text instead of screenshots: https://cohost.org/lurkjay/post/5166294-dealers-of-lightning

#reading #nonfiction #books #history #technology #engineering #computers #PersonalComputer #xerox #XeroxPARC #XeroxAlto #bookstodon

Thacker reasoned that if each of the computer’s routine tasks could somehow be ranked by urgency and funneled through the processor in appropriate order, he could keep the processor occupied almost full-time. If the ranking was correct, every task would be handled when it needed to be, no sooner and no later. Low-priority tasks could be interrupted for brief periods to make way for more urgent ones, then resumed later, when nothing more pressing was in the way. The gain in efficiency, speed, and hardware was potentially huge. Whole circuit boards that served as the ancillary brains of disk drives and other units could be dispensed with. The Alto’s CPU would be drafted into doing the thinking for all of them.

Thacker’s second crucial inspiration involved the question of how to power a high-performance display without busting the budget on memory. This was not trivial: He understood that the quality of the display would make or break his new computer.

Up until then, computer designers wishing to provide an interactive display faced two equally unappetizing choices: They could give the display little memory support, which led to flickering and slow performance, or they could provide backup memory through a character generator, which meant burdening the system with another and bug-prone peripheral the size of a washing machine.

Thacker struggled at length with the riddle of how to direct a suitable volume of information to the screen without adding excess hardware. The answer came to him one day while he was watching a demonstration of one of Kay’s graphics programs in the Systems Science Lab.

The demo utilized a character generator designed by a former Engelbart engineer named Roger Bates (with Lampson’s assistance). This unit, which had thousands of dollars’ worth of memory inside, was a distant relative of the one Ron Rider would later build for the SLOT. It was designed to store custom fonts by allowing each character to occupy a small rectangular patch of memory until summoned to the screen. Most of the PARC engineers considered it a disappointment, largely because the designers’ ambition to reproduce book-quality pages on the POLOS screen turned out to be a tougher programming challenge than they anticipated.

Kay’s group was an exception. Bored with the idea of painting text on the screen but fascinated with the possibility of displaying images, they had appropriated the system—“perverted it,” in Lampson’s unpejorative phrase—to use for their graphics and animation programs by loading its memory not with print characters, but graphical designs.

The result was a rudimentary black-and-white “bitmap”—a block of memory in which each bit corresponded to a dot on a display screen. Flip a given memory bit “on” and the corresponding dot lit up on the display; turn on these bits in a given pattern and you could map the same image to the screen.

As Lampson explained, “In the normal deal there would be a little bitmap for the character ‘A’ in the font memory and a bitmap for ‘B’ and ‘C’ and so on, and then the character memory would say display an ‘A,’ an ‘h,’ and an ‘a,’ and aha, you have ‘Aha.’ Alan said, ‘We’ll have a whole bunch of artificial characters numbered 1 through 500, and the character memory will say display 1, then 2, then 3.’ The result was to take the font memory and turn it into a bitmap”—that is, well before the lab had the resources to build a full-scale bitmap.

Kay’s group had only begun to investigate the potential of this new way of displaying information (although they had done enough to help persuade Thacker and Lampson of the need to equip the Alto with a high-resolution display). Among their first simple programs was one that could embed “icons,” or thumbnail-sized pictures, within blocks of text. Another was a painting system in which users wielded square “brushes” up to four pixels wide to draw or erase lines and curves on the screen.

Impressed as he was by these applications, Thacker was struck more by the underlying principle by which Kay’s system used the memory blocks.

He realized that just as Kay’s team had turned the character generator into a simple bitmap, he could convert idle blocks of the Alto’s main memory into a bitmap for the display screen. Forcing the memory to perform this double duty would eliminate the need for a separate character generator. This required cutting a few corners, because the display would now have to compete with all of the machine’s other functions for memory blocks. When the Alto placed a text document on its screen, for example, it would economize by omitting from the bitmap any part of the page that lacked text, such as the white spaces between lines and at all four margins. Also, whenever there were competing demands for memory from data and display, the display lost. Users had to be alerted to expect a strange phenomenon: During a work session the image of the document they were writing or editing would gradually shrink, like a window shade rolling up from the bottom. The reason was that as the increasing volume and complexity of the data claimed more memory, less remained for the bitmap. The same phenomenon accounted for what happened whenever the Alto displayed a full-screen graphical image. On those occasions it tended to run agonizingly slowly, in part because so many processor cycles were consumed in painting the screen, but also because the display consumed so much memory there was barely enough left to keep the program percolating along.

Can you imagine a time before the Graphical User Interface? Well then, join us as we discover one of the very first GUIs on the Xerox Alto!

Disponibile anche in 🇮🇹

https://blisscast.wordpress.com/2024/02/20/xerox-alto-trek-gui-wonderland-1/

#xerox #xeroxalto #vintagecomputer #gui #retrocomputer

Just another normal day in the Transmutable workshop.
#retrocomputing #TRS80 #XeroxAlto #smalls

A bench holding an old computer and parts for miniatures of an old computer.

Yep yep yep.
#retrocomputing
#replica
#XeroxAlto

The Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973, is uncannily familiar today, because we are living in a world of computing that the Alto created. Here's how the Alto came to be.

#ComputerHistory #PARC #Xerox #XeroxAlto #History
https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto