I've always been fascinated by the Alto, and the people who designed and built it, and how many of them went on to help make the Macintosh successful. And by ho

I've always been fascinated by the Alto, and the people who designed and built it, and how many of them went on to help make the Macintosh successful. And by how much work it took to make the Mac actually work. The Alto had to be one of the greatest design prototypes ever made. It wasn't ever made for sale, AFAIK, even though supposedly hundreds got shared with universities. But they built over a thousand and actually used them on an actual network. Every part of the system was continually developed in real world use. Even so, the performance, cost, and other rough edged impediments were too far away to commercialize it. The Star and the Lisa were failures. The Mac team had to hand code high performance graphic algorithms to get a GUI running in 128k, and a cheap one button mouse so they could make an affordable GUI computer for the masses. They had to come up with the Finder, the Desktop and Trashcan so that users never had to be exposed to a CLI. Even Bill Atkinsons invention of regions might have been key to making the Mac UI expressive enough to succeed with the general population. https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html