> I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare w

> I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sorry, but what is really irritating is the comparison you are making. 1973 component prices are in no way comparable to 1984 component prices, and Xerox's target market and desired margins were completely different from Apple's. If you actually look at the commercial machines that Xerox developed after the Alto prototypes, you find things like the Star, that came out for $16,000 in 1981. Compare that to the Apple Lisa, which came out for $10,000 in 1983. And it is not really a fair comparison, because the Star had much better hardware in every respect. What would be a fair comparison to the Lisa in terms of hardware capabilities would be the 1978 NoteTaker, built with off-the-shelf components for about $15,000 (my estimate: https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-personal-computer-you-havent-heard-of.html https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-perso...). The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive. If you want to say that not selling cheap mass-market products has "limited direct impact," that is true, but is also not a very insightful observation.