Look at what just arrived! This is a very important machine in the history of
personal computing. This is Xerox Alto, the first machine with a GUI, a machine that
inspired the Macintosh. With the mouse right there. We hope to get it back to its former glory.
We took it apart already. The guts of the machine slide out. Once again, although this machine
was never commercialized, it is super important in the history of personal
computing because it's the machine that was shown to Steve Jobs and inspired
this one: the Macintosh. So that's really considered the ancestor of all the
machines with a graphic user interface. "At the height of Apple's early success in
December 1979, Jobs, then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox
PARC". "And they showed me really three things but I was so blinded by the first
one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me
was object oriented programming. They showed me that but I didn't even see that.
The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. There were over a
hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc, etc. I didn't see
that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical
user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now
remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete
they had done a bunch of things wrong but we did not know that at the time. But still
though, the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well. And
within, you know, ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would
work like this
someday"
So here are the guts of it, 4 big fans, a wire-wrapped backplane.
A whole bunch of power supplies, -15, +15, +12, +5 and -5. Very well engineered for research machine. And it's
a simple machine made out of TTL, 32 bit and somewhere, here is the heart of it.
It's the ALU. I can pull it out. You will see that it's actually based on plain TTL, 74Hxx stuff, low scale
integration. And a bit slice ALU, 74181. A 32 [actually 16] bit machine made just out of TTL parts.
Very much in advance of its time.
Design started in 73, I believe this is an Alto II, a slightly later 78
machine. And let's not forget the beautiful disk drive, a Diablo I
think, we have the platter. It's a removable platter, 2.5 MB.
With a little bit of chance we will run the operating system from there and see the first windows
on a personal computer. So I can't wait that we try to restore this historic
Xerox Alto