16 ms·

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World

270 points by samizdis 4y ago

kpgraham 4y ago
In the early 1980s, I got a job at Western Union (the old telecom company, not the thing it became). I was programming special reports in 4GL languages like RAMIS and MARK IV plus a little COBOL, and I was asked at one point to see if I could find a use for the Xerox Star, a descendant of the Alto. It was the first time I had ever heard of a mouse, and I had never seen a real GUI before. The system was very cool, but my experience was that it was best used as a word processor and typesetting machine. It had a programming environment, but I did have a language manual and was never able to write any programs for it. I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.
- kps 4y ago
  There is an emulator now, https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar
- mcdonje 4y ago
  >Windows was a poor substitute for the feel of the Star interface. I'm intrigued. Any specifics about design decisions come to mind?
Aloha 4y ago
This is an excellent book explaining the wonders of Xerox PARC and what they wrought for us all. It also explains succinctly why and how Xerox failed to monetize all of the innovations created within. (Their sales force didn't know how to sell something without a lease and a per-imprint charge (where's the click), and management didn't really understand why what PARC created was important or how to monetize it. Also, the people at PARC had some measure of trouble knowing how to commercialize anything.) I read the book at a 17 year old shortly after it came out, and found it very very compelling. https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA/ https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer... Also, here is a thread about the book with Alan Kay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275 Another thread with Albert Cory is here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626413
- nbaksalyar 4y ago
  > This is an excellent book explaining the wonders of Xerox PARC and what they wrought for us all. There's another great book which puts Xerox PARC into context, "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop [0]. It goes into much detail about how Xerox PARC came to be and how the ideas behind it developed. It's the best book on the computer history I've read. [0] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  thanks for the shoutout. Dealers of Lightning is indeed excellent. My book takes the path of putting fictional characters (except for Dan, who is me) in it, who do not know how it's going to turn out. I had the help of nearly everyone who's still alive, and all the actual events really happened. Xerox really did have a guy with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions at the trade shows. As for the 40+ year-old debate about what Xerox should have done, Jerry Morrison and I considered that at length here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
  - Aloha 4y ago
    That was a great post! I didnt realize you did 3+Mail too, the whole 3com office suite and hardware is something almost lost to history, same with 3com NBX PBX.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Thanks! 3+Mail is in the second book: https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks Actual events like me pulling apart the ThinNet Ethernet cable and taking down the entire company for a few seconds (no one noticed), The Lisa adopting Hungarian notation because of the Simonyi influence (in one part of the code). DataPoint having a terrific LAN before anyone else, and going nowhere with it. 3Com buying Bridge, a leader in routers, and running it into the ground, meanwhile ignoring Cisco. 3Com'ers spending all day arguing about a post on WantAds, because they were so desperate for a social network.
johnea 4y ago
I saw one of these in the early 1980s at a Xerox engineering facility in LA. It was shocking! They also had a LAN where H/W engineers submitted their (graphically captured) schematics to the in-house PCB fab, via electronic transfer. A week or two later, their prototype PCBs would arrive via the mail delivery robot!!! I'm not kidding, the robot would follow it's route and beep in front of an individual's office when they had mail on the cart. It was WAY more back-to-the-future than any bullshit dispensed by M$ and Goggle today. And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago? Quite simple really: technical innovation is not seen as driving shareholder value. Why should a company invent something new when its "more productive" to just squeeze their vendors, employees and customers more tightly? This is really in the same vein as M$ brain damaging billions of people into thinking "this is what a computer is". There are no current trends in opposition of this corporate domination. If you think housing, economic equity, or employee rights are trampled today, just wait. It's only going to get worse, until the mass of the population wakes up to who is actually screwing them! It wasn't hippy tree huggers that sent all US manufacturing to China. undermining the entire US workforce, and leading to the current situation. Where those same assholes are now crying about the advancement of Chinese efforts to enact it's own world domination. CEOs paid for that rise in Chinese aggression by buying the crack of products produced with cheap slave labor. While continuing to dumb down the US population, and sell the same computer that Xerox didn't know what to do with 50 years ago. Prepare yourself, it's only going to get worse...
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  and stay off my lawn! i also wonder at the amount of DARPA/DoD/secret funds that went into the early advances, and where they are now (a cia guy told me they saved Sun from bankruptcy early on by buying a bunch of machines, Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, etc )
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    > Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, no, it was the aliens on a side trip after they visited Roswell. Smalltalk didn't have a "killer app."
mihaela 4y ago
I guess the experience was faster than most of Electron-based "apPS" nowdays.
fwlr 4y ago
Xerox Alto, the PayPal Mafia. Any other groups figure importantly in the history of tech? I love reading about this stuff.
- waldothedog 4y ago
  You might enjoy “The Idea Factory” about Bell Labs. I found it hard to put down.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Well, the Macintosh team certainly thought they were. There's a YT video about General Magic that tries to paint them that way, and they thought of themselves that way at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek Take it all with a grain of salt.
- nabla9 4y ago
  Traitorous eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
- nabla9 4y ago
  TOTO’s Universal Design Research Centre in Japan. Over 900 researchers improving human condition. https://www.totousa.com/toto-universal-design-center https://www.totousa.com/toto-universal-design-center
ryukafalz 4y ago
The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Programmability only matters to users who can program - which is a tiny minority. There is no sense in which HN or a PhD-packed centre like PARC represents the interests of typical users, who are perfectly happy to use relatively dumb information appliances that can only be customised with ready made applications controlled through some vaguely graphical UI/OS. PARC's real legacy was the creation of a workable model for non-expert UIs. The Smalltalk/LISP angle was never going to be more than incidental. I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be. AI promises to be at least as transformative because it won't be long - more than five, less than ten years - before it allows complex customised context-aware task-oriented voice commands that aren't mired in the thousands of random switches, file location inconsistencies, and other dinosaur bullshit of the UNIX command line.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    "Can program" is a spectrum, not a binary. It depends not only on the user's skill, but on the environment they're working in. Introduce kids to Scratch and they will program. Have someone use Excel and they will program, though they won't say that's what they're doing! > I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be. I don't think we can say this with any certainty. Most people have never had an environment like this available to them.
Animats 4y ago
You can be too early. The Alto in 1975, when I first saw one, was a very expensive machine. It was a minicomputer, a modified Data General machine. Affordable hardware to do that was over a decade away. Along the way was the Xerox Star (too expensive), the Apple Lisa (too expensive), the original Macintosh (too underpowered), quite a few workstations based on Unix and Motorola 68000s (expensive but usable), and the forgotten era of shared-logic word processors (affordable, but dumb). It wasn't until the late 1980s that a mass-market Smalltalk machine was affordable.
- blihp 4y ago
  That was the entire point of what they were doing at PARC: build a possible computing future. They were not trying to build a mass market solution, they were trying to pull what could be commonplace 10-15 years in the future with smart, motivated people and money-is-no-object hardware budgets. Sure, they couldn't turn it into products in the 70's, but they would have had one hell of a product roadmap for the next 50 years if management understood what they had.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    "Xerox PARC" is not one word. There was PARC, and then there was SDD, which was trying to turn it into a business product (not a mass market). Something that Xerox would sell for "knowledge workers" in Fortune 500 companies. Xerox never had any interest in selling for home use, and it was a genuine shock when Apple proceeded to do exactly that, and office workers started bringing their Apple II's to work so they could use VisiCalc. Something everyone at Xerox would prefer to forget: they rushed out the 820 to stop that shit, a CP/M based PC that they called, believe it or not, "the Apple killer." You probably think I'm making that up. I was there. Star 1.0 had no spreadsheet, believe it or not. Spreadsheets were in people's minds, but it was way too late to add one in. Lastly, it's claimed by multiple Xeroids that the laser printers made enough money for Xerox to pay for all of PARC's expenses, easily. I tried to verify that, but it's just not possible.
    - blihp 4y ago
debarshri 4y ago
I wonder if Google is today's Xerox and all the research happening at Google is equivalent to stuff PARC did in 80s
- blihp 4y ago
  Doubtful. There are glimmers of good ideas, just like there were out of Microsoft and Apple research in previous decades. But ultimately, the scope and scale of what PARC was working on (and prior to that (D)ARPA) hasn't been attempted since AFAIK.
bruce511 4y ago
Xerox PARC is the stuff of legend. Its an accident of both time (ICs are becoming available), money (Xerox is happy to pour money into the thing with no real objectives) and people (a literal who's who of talent.) New, but possible, industries last only for a moment. Gathering talent for that moment and just letting them create, results in an explosion. It's rare precisely because its impossible to manufacture. These days money is easy. People is harder. Right-Time is impossible. Computing is ubiquitous, nothing new will have the same depth as PARC. The biggest change since PARC has been touch screens. That's significant, but a single technology. When PARC happens again it won't be in tech, but in some other field, something that's new, but possible. I have lived a life in the shadow and shade that PARC created. I tip my hat, raise a glass and salute you all.
- Swizec 4y ago
  > Right-Time is impossible. I think we’re right around the Right-Time era for biotech and genetic engineering. CRISPR is easily Xerox PARC level of influence on the next era of tech.
- ido 4y ago
  How about the Web?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    If you mean web not internet then there is a similar confluence there, Cern, money into research, Tim Berners-Lee and advocates of what he created.
    - ido 4y ago
      I meant "The biggest change since PARC has been touch screens" -> hasn't the Web been a bigger change than touch screens?
- hardware2win 4y ago
  World improving tech constanty appear E.g payment systems and logistic solutions. Cloud also changed a lot.
pjmlp 4y ago
Pity that Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D and Smalltalk did not have the same luck in OS design and system languages.
deafpolygon 4y ago
And yet slowly-slowly-slowly, we're moving back towards this: "These and the other mainframes and minicomputers of the era were room-size affairs, almost always located somewhere away from the user and almost always under the control of someone else." More and more computing is going up into the 'cloud' which is just "fancy" for someone else's computing mainframe.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Todays cloud would seem like absolute magic to those of the mainframe era.
DeathArrow 4y ago
But it's not the inventor who made the money (Xerox), it's others who got rich (Apple, MS, Google)).
cultureswitch 4y ago
Anyone else spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why the mouse is on the left of the keyboard in this picture? I thought left handed people generally still used the right hand for the mouse? Is that not true? Why did they use this picture specifically, is the mouse on the left supposed to mean something related to the article?
- TacoSteemers 4y ago
  I do think that you are overthinking it. That mouse is not shaped to the right hand. There is no reason to assign significance to it in my opinion.
- calgoo 4y ago
  Im left handed and can use the mouse on both sides. Started using it on the left when i was young, but was almost forced to use the right hand because of space issues in computer labs where they try to fit as many computers as possible next to each other. Whenever I tried to use it with my left hand, I ended up entangled with the person on my left.
- mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
  I'm left handed but always used a mouse right handed growing up for a few reasons: 1. My family was poor, I didn't have access to a computer that was ours so I only used other people's and it was set up with mouse on right 2. Video games would require so much effort to rebind to play comfortably with mouse on left Now as an adult I have a symmetrical mouse and switch which side I use during the workday (where I mostly am just typing and not mousing) occasionally for comfort
acd 4y ago
We are living with similar computers to the Xerox Palo Alto. Steve Jobs got inspired the Palo Alto. Then we also have The Mother of all demos which was influental for the Xerox Palo Alto. The mother of all demos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY
SergeAx 4y ago
I personally live in the world of smartphones. I also tried VR: both Valve Index and Quest 2 and the second one is a nearest thing to what I'd call a breakthrough. Another couple of years - and we may have something really interesting in that field.

270 points by samizdis 4y ago

In the early 1980s, I got a job at Western Union (the old telecom company, not the thing it became). I was programming special reports in 4GL languages like RAMIS and MARK IV plus a little COBOL, and I was asked at one point to see if I could find a use for the Xerox Star, a descendant of the Alto. It was the first time I had ever heard of a mouse, and I had never seen a real GUI before. The system was very cool, but my experience was that it was best used as a word processor and typesetting machine. It had a programming environment, but I did have a language manual and was never able to write any programs for it. I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.

kps 4y ago
There is an emulator now, https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar
mcdonje 4y ago
>Windows was a poor substitute for the feel of the Star interface. I'm intrigued. Any specifics about design decisions come to mind?

Aloha 4y ago

This is an excellent book explaining the wonders of Xerox PARC and what they wrought for us all. It also explains succinctly why and how Xerox failed to monetize all of the innovations created within. (Their sales force didn't know how to sell something without a lease and a per-imprint charge (where's the click), and management didn't really understand why what PARC created was important or how to monetize it. Also, the people at PARC had some measure of trouble knowing how to commercialize anything.) I read the book at a 17 year old shortly after it came out, and found it very very compelling. https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA/ https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer... Also, here is a thread about the book with Alan Kay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275 Another thread with Albert Cory is here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626413

nbaksalyar 4y ago
> This is an excellent book explaining the wonders of Xerox PARC and what they wrought for us all. There's another great book which puts Xerox PARC into context, "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop [0]. It goes into much detail about how Xerox PARC came to be and how the ideas behind it developed. It's the best book on the computer history I've read. [0] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
AlbertCory 4y ago
thanks for the shoutout. Dealers of Lightning is indeed excellent. My book takes the path of putting fictional characters (except for Dan, who is me) in it, who do not know how it's going to turn out. I had the help of nearly everyone who's still alive, and all the actual events really happened. Xerox really did have a guy with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions at the trade shows. As for the 40+ year-old debate about what Xerox should have done, Jerry Morrison and I considered that at length here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
- Aloha 4y ago
  That was a great post! I didnt realize you did 3+Mail too, the whole 3com office suite and hardware is something almost lost to history, same with 3com NBX PBX.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thanks! 3+Mail is in the second book: https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks Actual events like me pulling apart the ThinNet Ethernet cable and taking down the entire company for a few seconds (no one noticed), The Lisa adopting Hungarian notation because of the Simonyi influence (in one part of the code). DataPoint having a terrific LAN before anyone else, and going nowhere with it. 3Com buying Bridge, a leader in routers, and running it into the ground, meanwhile ignoring Cisco. 3Com'ers spending all day arguing about a post on WantAds, because they were so desperate for a social network.

johnea 4y ago

I saw one of these in the early 1980s at a Xerox engineering facility in LA. It was shocking! They also had a LAN where H/W engineers submitted their (graphically captured) schematics to the in-house PCB fab, via electronic transfer. A week or two later, their prototype PCBs would arrive via the mail delivery robot!!! I'm not kidding, the robot would follow it's route and beep in front of an individual's office when they had mail on the cart. It was WAY more back-to-the-future than any bullshit dispensed by M$ and Goggle today. And WHY haven't we advanced beyond the human/computer interface introduced 50 years ago? Quite simple really: technical innovation is not seen as driving shareholder value. Why should a company invent something new when its "more productive" to just squeeze their vendors, employees and customers more tightly? This is really in the same vein as M$ brain damaging billions of people into thinking "this is what a computer is". There are no current trends in opposition of this corporate domination. If you think housing, economic equity, or employee rights are trampled today, just wait. It's only going to get worse, until the mass of the population wakes up to who is actually screwing them! It wasn't hippy tree huggers that sent all US manufacturing to China. undermining the entire US workforce, and leading to the current situation. Where those same assholes are now crying about the advancement of Chinese efforts to enact it's own world domination. CEOs paid for that rise in Chinese aggression by buying the crack of products produced with cheap slave labor. While continuing to dumb down the US population, and sell the same computer that Xerox didn't know what to do with 50 years ago. Prepare yourself, it's only going to get worse...

readthenotes1 4y ago
and stay off my lawn! i also wonder at the amount of DARPA/DoD/secret funds that went into the early advances, and where they are now (a cia guy told me they saved Sun from bankruptcy early on by buying a bunch of machines, Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, etc )
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  > Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA, no, it was the aliens on a side trip after they visited Roswell. Smalltalk didn't have a "killer app."

mihaela 4y ago

I guess the experience was faster than most of Electron-based "apPS" nowdays.

fwlr 4y ago

Xerox Alto, the PayPal Mafia. Any other groups figure importantly in the history of tech? I love reading about this stuff.

waldothedog 4y ago
You might enjoy “The Idea Factory” about Bell Labs. I found it hard to put down.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Well, the Macintosh team certainly thought they were. There's a YT video about General Magic that tries to paint them that way, and they thought of themselves that way at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek Take it all with a grain of salt.
nabla9 4y ago
Traitorous eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
nabla9 4y ago
TOTO’s Universal Design Research Centre in Japan. Over 900 researchers improving human condition. https://www.totousa.com/toto-universal-design-center https://www.totousa.com/toto-universal-design-center

ryukafalz 4y ago

The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Programmability only matters to users who can program - which is a tiny minority. There is no sense in which HN or a PhD-packed centre like PARC represents the interests of typical users, who are perfectly happy to use relatively dumb information appliances that can only be customised with ready made applications controlled through some vaguely graphical UI/OS. PARC's real legacy was the creation of a workable model for non-expert UIs. The Smalltalk/LISP angle was never going to be more than incidental. I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be. AI promises to be at least as transformative because it won't be long - more than five, less than ten years - before it allows complex customised context-aware task-oriented voice commands that aren't mired in the thousands of random switches, file location inconsistencies, and other dinosaur bullshit of the UNIX command line.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  "Can program" is a spectrum, not a binary. It depends not only on the user's skill, but on the environment they're working in. Introduce kids to Scratch and they will program. Have someone use Excel and they will program, though they won't say that's what they're doing! > I'm personally a huge fan of it. But it's completely opaque to a typical user and always will be. I don't think we can say this with any certainty. Most people have never had an environment like this available to them.

Animats 4y ago

You can be too early. The Alto in 1975, when I first saw one, was a very expensive machine. It was a minicomputer, a modified Data General machine. Affordable hardware to do that was over a decade away. Along the way was the Xerox Star (too expensive), the Apple Lisa (too expensive), the original Macintosh (too underpowered), quite a few workstations based on Unix and Motorola 68000s (expensive but usable), and the forgotten era of shared-logic word processors (affordable, but dumb). It wasn't until the late 1980s that a mass-market Smalltalk machine was affordable.

blihp 4y ago
That was the entire point of what they were doing at PARC: build a possible computing future. They were not trying to build a mass market solution, they were trying to pull what could be commonplace 10-15 years in the future with smart, motivated people and money-is-no-object hardware budgets. Sure, they couldn't turn it into products in the 70's, but they would have had one hell of a product roadmap for the next 50 years if management understood what they had.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  "Xerox PARC" is not one word. There was PARC, and then there was SDD, which was trying to turn it into a business product (not a mass market). Something that Xerox would sell for "knowledge workers" in Fortune 500 companies. Xerox never had any interest in selling for home use, and it was a genuine shock when Apple proceeded to do exactly that, and office workers started bringing their Apple II's to work so they could use VisiCalc. Something everyone at Xerox would prefer to forget: they rushed out the 820 to stop that shit, a CP/M based PC that they called, believe it or not, "the Apple killer." You probably think I'm making that up. I was there. Star 1.0 had no spreadsheet, believe it or not. Spreadsheets were in people's minds, but it was way too late to add one in. Lastly, it's claimed by multiple Xeroids that the laser printers made enough money for Xerox to pay for all of PARC's expenses, easily. I tried to verify that, but it's just not possible.
  - blihp 4y ago

debarshri 4y ago

I wonder if Google is today's Xerox and all the research happening at Google is equivalent to stuff PARC did in 80s

blihp 4y ago
Doubtful. There are glimmers of good ideas, just like there were out of Microsoft and Apple research in previous decades. But ultimately, the scope and scale of what PARC was working on (and prior to that (D)ARPA) hasn't been attempted since AFAIK.

bruce511 4y ago

Xerox PARC is the stuff of legend. Its an accident of both time (ICs are becoming available), money (Xerox is happy to pour money into the thing with no real objectives) and people (a literal who's who of talent.) New, but possible, industries last only for a moment. Gathering talent for that moment and just letting them create, results in an explosion. It's rare precisely because its impossible to manufacture. These days money is easy. People is harder. Right-Time is impossible. Computing is ubiquitous, nothing new will have the same depth as PARC. The biggest change since PARC has been touch screens. That's significant, but a single technology. When PARC happens again it won't be in tech, but in some other field, something that's new, but possible. I have lived a life in the shadow and shade that PARC created. I tip my hat, raise a glass and salute you all.

Swizec 4y ago
> Right-Time is impossible. I think we’re right around the Right-Time era for biotech and genetic engineering. CRISPR is easily Xerox PARC level of influence on the next era of tech.
ido 4y ago
How about the Web?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  If you mean web not internet then there is a similar confluence there, Cern, money into research, Tim Berners-Lee and advocates of what he created.
  - ido 4y ago
    I meant "The biggest change since PARC has been touch screens" -> hasn't the Web been a bigger change than touch screens?
hardware2win 4y ago
World improving tech constanty appear E.g payment systems and logistic solutions. Cloud also changed a lot.

pjmlp 4y ago

Pity that Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D and Smalltalk did not have the same luck in OS design and system languages.

deafpolygon 4y ago

And yet slowly-slowly-slowly, we're moving back towards this: "These and the other mainframes and minicomputers of the era were room-size affairs, almost always located somewhere away from the user and almost always under the control of someone else." More and more computing is going up into the 'cloud' which is just "fancy" for someone else's computing mainframe.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Todays cloud would seem like absolute magic to those of the mainframe era.

DeathArrow 4y ago

But it's not the inventor who made the money (Xerox), it's others who got rich (Apple, MS, Google)).

cultureswitch 4y ago

Anyone else spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why the mouse is on the left of the keyboard in this picture? I thought left handed people generally still used the right hand for the mouse? Is that not true? Why did they use this picture specifically, is the mouse on the left supposed to mean something related to the article?

TacoSteemers 4y ago
I do think that you are overthinking it. That mouse is not shaped to the right hand. There is no reason to assign significance to it in my opinion.
calgoo 4y ago
Im left handed and can use the mouse on both sides. Started using it on the left when i was young, but was almost forced to use the right hand because of space issues in computer labs where they try to fit as many computers as possible next to each other. Whenever I tried to use it with my left hand, I ended up entangled with the person on my left.
mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
I'm left handed but always used a mouse right handed growing up for a few reasons: 1. My family was poor, I didn't have access to a computer that was ours so I only used other people's and it was set up with mouse on right 2. Video games would require so much effort to rebind to play comfortably with mouse on left Now as an adult I have a symmetrical mouse and switch which side I use during the workday (where I mostly am just typing and not mousing) occasionally for comfort

acd 4y ago

We are living with similar computers to the Xerox Palo Alto. Steve Jobs got inspired the Palo Alto. Then we also have The Mother of all demos which was influental for the Xerox Palo Alto. The mother of all demos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

SergeAx 4y ago

I personally live in the world of smartphones. I also tried VR: both Valve Index and Quest 2 and the second one is a nearest thing to what I'd call a breakthrough. Another couple of years - and we may have something really interesting in that field.