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Nov 10 CHM: Live Xerox Alto demo with original PARC development team

54 points by fernly 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Stratoscope 9y ago
For anyone who has as much trouble reading this on a mobile device as I did (what happened to the contrast?): CHM Live Yesterday’s Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto Live Alto Demonstrations by: Doug Brotz, Dan Ingalls, Tom Malloy, John Shoch, Charles Simonyi, Bob Sproull. 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 computer scientists and engineers who made real their idea of “distributed personal computing.” Original members of the PARC team will present live demonstrations of, and discuss, some of the Alto’s remarkable achievements: Tom Malloy and Charles Simonyi will present Bravo, the WYSIWYG word processor; Bob Sproull will show the graphics programs Markup and Draw; Doug Brotz will display the email client Laurel; Dan Ingalls will reveal the breakthrough programming environment and language Smalltalk; and John Shoch will survey the Alto’s other accomplishments. Our program will close with an audience Q&A session with the PARC presenters. The event will be moderated by David C. Brock, Director of the Museum’s Center for Software History. This will be a unique opportunity to learn about yesterday’s computer of tomorrow that profoundly shaped our world. This event is co-produced by the Museum’s Center for Software History @CHM(, which collects preserves, interprets, and presents to the world the history of software and its ongoing impact on global society. The Center for Software History’s Al Kossow restored two Xerox Alto computers starting in March of 2017 as part of the center’s Alto System Project. An extensive Alto software archive has been preserved by Al Kossow and extensively curated by valued Museum volunteer Paul McJones, and it publicly available on the Museum’s website. You can learn more about the revolutionary Alto in our permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
Argh! I know CHM have put alot of stuff up on YouTube, and I hope they do for this as well. There are already two other events in this time-slot that I want to go to!
- chanelloren 9y ago
  Hi! I am the Associate Producer for live events at the Computer History Museum. Yes, this live show will be published on the Computer History Museums YouTube channel a couple days after the event. If you cannot attend in person or watch the show on the Facebook live stream, you can watch it on demand immediately after the show on the museums Facebook page in the video section. Let me know if you have any additional questions!
  - CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
    That's awesome. Thanks very much!
    - chanelloren 9y ago
      You're welcome!
convolvatron 9y ago
i know everyone says this, but I'm so glad they found a way to make this happen. now that thats out of the way could we do the same with a Symbolics? who do I contact to volunteer time?
- jf 9y ago
  General volunteering information for the CHM is here: http://www.computerhistory.org/volunteers/ http://www.computerhistory.org/volunteers/ As far as the Symbolics event goes, could you email me what you're thinking about so I can pass the idea along? (As a MacIvory owner myself, I can guess what you'd like to see but I'd want to be sure)
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    I just think it would be fantastic to have a presentation from people who had their hands in it about what made that such a different and productive platform. especially given the level of general interest in that topic the last couple years. thanks very much for the link, will follow up there
ellisd 9y ago
After sitting down on a real Alto machine last week at the Living Computers: Museum + Labs, I'm beyond excited for this event! Thank you so much to the speakers, sponsors and organizers for arranging this.
exikyut 9y ago
What might make this a thousand times better is a way to submit questions online for the Q&A session. Obviously some hard decisions would need to be made about which questions to actually ask, but a voting system, while crude, might allow the question database to self-prioritize before the event. --- I have to admit that the question I immediately wanted to ask this group is very offtopic, but I wanted to add the above suggestion anyway because I know others likely would come up with good questions. FWIW, here's what I thought of: The source code to SketchPad turned up online several months ago: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726903 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726903 I'd love to see a functional TX-2 emulator that can run SketchPad, and I'd be very willing to commit time to making it a reality. But the source scan is of extremely poor quality, AFAIK comprehensive in-depth info about the TX-2 isn't really out there, and no hardware survives. A better scan would be an excellent start. I'm in Australia, or I'd have volunteered the time to rescan everything a very long time ago. From there, much more info about the TX-2 is needed. I'm reminded of http://martin.poupe.org/casio/ http://martin.poupe.org/casio/ (select "assembler information", the site uses frames) who reverse-engineered and wrote an assembler for his calculator without knowing anything about the architecture - but he had hardware he could experiment with. Again, I realize this is incredibly offtopic...
- chanelloren 9y ago
  Hi! I am an Associate Producer at the museum and you will have the opportunity to submit questions in the comment section on the Facebook live stream. I will be collection questions from our virtual audience. Go to the museums Facebook page @ 7pm on November 10th. I hope you get a chance to watch live!
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Arg! This is so awesome, but I don't have a Facebook account :'(
    - chanelloren 9y ago
      Ahh, I see. Unfortunately, at this time we only collect questions from our in-person audience that attends as well as the comment section from the Facebook live stream player. Apologies about this!
Animats 9y ago
I saw this demo in 1975. But then it was Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, neither of whom is presenting this time. I've used Bravo on an Alto. It was a good editor, the predecessor of Microsoft Word. On the Alto, it was used for programming as well as document preparation. The file format was plain text, then a control-Z, then the formatting information. The Mesa compiler stopped reading at control-Z, so you could put boldface and such in your source code. Those were cute machines. I used them in the 1980s, when they were obsolete, and Stanford still had a few running.
memsom 9y ago
The Alto is getting a lot more press recently! CuriousMarc is currently fixing another one for the Digibarn[0]. I'd never seen one till the first of his videos, only knew they existed because of the Apple history and through a semester of Smalltalk at University. Very interesting. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSPlr4AZsKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSPlr4AZsKQ

54 points by fernly 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

For anyone who has as much trouble reading this on a mobile device as I did (what happened to the contrast?): CHM Live Yesterday’s Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto Live Alto Demonstrations by: Doug Brotz, Dan Ingalls, Tom Malloy, John Shoch, Charles Simonyi, Bob Sproull. 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 computer scientists and engineers who made real their idea of “distributed personal computing.” Original members of the PARC team will present live demonstrations of, and discuss, some of the Alto’s remarkable achievements: Tom Malloy and Charles Simonyi will present Bravo, the WYSIWYG word processor; Bob Sproull will show the graphics programs Markup and Draw; Doug Brotz will display the email client Laurel; Dan Ingalls will reveal the breakthrough programming environment and language Smalltalk; and John Shoch will survey the Alto’s other accomplishments. Our program will close with an audience Q&A session with the PARC presenters. The event will be moderated by David C. Brock, Director of the Museum’s Center for Software History. This will be a unique opportunity to learn about yesterday’s computer of tomorrow that profoundly shaped our world. This event is co-produced by the Museum’s Center for Software History @CHM(, which collects preserves, interprets, and presents to the world the history of software and its ongoing impact on global society. The Center for Software History’s Al Kossow restored two Xerox Alto computers starting in March of 2017 as part of the center’s Alto System Project. An extensive Alto software archive has been preserved by Al Kossow and extensively curated by valued Museum volunteer Paul McJones, and it publicly available on the Museum’s website. You can learn more about the revolutionary Alto in our permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

CaliforniaKarl 9y ago

Argh! I know CHM have put alot of stuff up on YouTube, and I hope they do for this as well. There are already two other events in this time-slot that I want to go to!

chanelloren 9y ago
Hi! I am the Associate Producer for live events at the Computer History Museum. Yes, this live show will be published on the Computer History Museums YouTube channel a couple days after the event. If you cannot attend in person or watch the show on the Facebook live stream, you can watch it on demand immediately after the show on the museums Facebook page in the video section. Let me know if you have any additional questions!
- CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
  That's awesome. Thanks very much!
  - chanelloren 9y ago
    You're welcome!

convolvatron 9y ago

i know everyone says this, but I'm so glad they found a way to make this happen. now that thats out of the way could we do the same with a Symbolics? who do I contact to volunteer time?

jf 9y ago
General volunteering information for the CHM is here: http://www.computerhistory.org/volunteers/ http://www.computerhistory.org/volunteers/ As far as the Symbolics event goes, could you email me what you're thinking about so I can pass the idea along? (As a MacIvory owner myself, I can guess what you'd like to see but I'd want to be sure)
- convolvatron 9y ago
  I just think it would be fantastic to have a presentation from people who had their hands in it about what made that such a different and productive platform. especially given the level of general interest in that topic the last couple years. thanks very much for the link, will follow up there

ellisd 9y ago

After sitting down on a real Alto machine last week at the Living Computers: Museum + Labs, I'm beyond excited for this event! Thank you so much to the speakers, sponsors and organizers for arranging this.

exikyut 9y ago

What might make this a thousand times better is a way to submit questions online for the Q&A session. Obviously some hard decisions would need to be made about which questions to actually ask, but a voting system, while crude, might allow the question database to self-prioritize before the event. --- I have to admit that the question I immediately wanted to ask this group is very offtopic, but I wanted to add the above suggestion anyway because I know others likely would come up with good questions. FWIW, here's what I thought of: The source code to SketchPad turned up online several months ago: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726903 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726903 I'd love to see a functional TX-2 emulator that can run SketchPad, and I'd be very willing to commit time to making it a reality. But the source scan is of extremely poor quality, AFAIK comprehensive in-depth info about the TX-2 isn't really out there, and no hardware survives. A better scan would be an excellent start. I'm in Australia, or I'd have volunteered the time to rescan everything a very long time ago. From there, much more info about the TX-2 is needed. I'm reminded of http://martin.poupe.org/casio/ http://martin.poupe.org/casio/ (select "assembler information", the site uses frames) who reverse-engineered and wrote an assembler for his calculator without knowing anything about the architecture - but he had hardware he could experiment with. Again, I realize this is incredibly offtopic...

chanelloren 9y ago
Hi! I am an Associate Producer at the museum and you will have the opportunity to submit questions in the comment section on the Facebook live stream. I will be collection questions from our virtual audience. Go to the museums Facebook page @ 7pm on November 10th. I hope you get a chance to watch live!
- exikyut 9y ago
  Arg! This is so awesome, but I don't have a Facebook account :'(
  - chanelloren 9y ago
    Ahh, I see. Unfortunately, at this time we only collect questions from our in-person audience that attends as well as the comment section from the Facebook live stream player. Apologies about this!

Animats 9y ago

I saw this demo in 1975. But then it was Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, neither of whom is presenting this time. I've used Bravo on an Alto. It was a good editor, the predecessor of Microsoft Word. On the Alto, it was used for programming as well as document preparation. The file format was plain text, then a control-Z, then the formatting information. The Mesa compiler stopped reading at control-Z, so you could put boldface and such in your source code. Those were cute machines. I used them in the 1980s, when they were obsolete, and Stanford still had a few running.

memsom 9y ago

The Alto is getting a lot more press recently! CuriousMarc is currently fixing another one for the Digibarn[0]. I'd never seen one till the first of his videos, only knew they existed because of the Apple history and through a semester of Smalltalk at University. Very interesting. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSPlr4AZsKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSPlr4AZsKQ