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 X

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.