5 ms·
The Xerox Tragedy
- pinewurst 3y ago(2000)
- gjvc 3y agoIt's unlikely to have happened last week, is it?
- orionblastar 3y agoXerox had the Star and Altos computers that had Apple look at during their visit of the PARC place. It influenced the Apple Lisa and Macintosh line of computers. Without that Apple would still be an 8 bit company using commands instead of icons. There was an exchange of Apple stock to Xerox for use of their GUI by Apple. https://youtu.be/eZUEWd5OZ2Y https://youtu.be/eZUEWd5OZ2Y
- hackermatic 3y agoSpeaking of 1983, if you want to see why they failed, look at what they put into the PC market instead of the Star and Alto: The Xerox 820 [0], an expensive, uninspired knockoff CP/M machine that was positioned to beat the IBM PC and promptly fell on its face. I actually just got another 820-II this week -- I had one when I was a kid, handed down from my grandpa who got it at a bargain basement price. The thing that endears it to me 40 years after release is how needlessly MASSIVE it is: The keyboard alone is the size of a few of the binders of manuals that shipped with it, but it's almost completely hollow; and for storage, I have a separate enclosure with a combination 8" (!) floppy drive and 8MB hard disk, its own power supply, and a half-inch-thick data cable. (There was a much more reasonable dual 5.25" drive enclosure, but the "big iron" is what I grew up with.) PARC was really a completely different world from the rest of Xerox. Maybe they should have let more people come tour and shamelessly steal their ideas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820