Talk:Xerox Alto

Optical mouse ?

I find it hard to believe this computer used an optical mouse.

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• Anyhow, it might have used an optical mouse, but not of the current style with a fancy image sensor and digital image processing. The original optical mice required a special mousepad printed with blue and grey lines, and could only detect mouse movement relative to those lines. See the Mouse_(computing)#Optical_mice. --Brouhaha 03:20, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • This description fits the optical mice used by the first Sun workstations (which were directly inspired by the Alto). --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 03:53, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

The Alto never used the Mouse Systems Optical Mouse, the one with the striped mousepad. It did have optical encoders on the shafts of a ball mouse. At one time "optical" meant an optical encoder rather than a mechanical encoder to turn rotational motion into quadrature signals. The quadrature output was directly connected to a readible register, and software interpreted the signals into curson position changes. --User:brtech

The optical mouse used by the Alto was invented and manufactured in-house. It was fully plug compatible with the original mechanical mice. It used a paper optical target that was a a gray halftone, i.e. a hexagonal pattern of small dots. See US Patent 4,521,772. —Preceding unsigned comment added by StandardsNettle (talk • contribs) 06:46, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

First personal computer ?

"The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, was the first personal computer" -- This page says otherwise: http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml and no, --Brouhaha, I won't sign my contributions to talk pages, edit it and sign it for me, god your lazy.

Looking at the link, I think the claim that this is the first personal computer is justified. The earlier ones don't quite deserve that label, although they are pretty interesting. It would also be nice to have references to Englebart and NLS in the history of the Alto.--Gerry Gleason 16:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

In fact, according to the article, "The Xerox Star: A Retrospective" by Jeff J. et al., members of PARC including Alan Kay COINED the term "personal computer" in 1973. --JungIn (talk) 06:07, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Chuck Norris?...

Might be a namesake, but please, don't link to the roundhouse kicking guy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.83.38.117 (talk) 14:39, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Operating system

What OS did the Alto use? Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 02:23, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

• Usually the Alto Operating System. Back in the early 1970s, if you developed a new computer you generally had to write your own operating system, as there weren't yet any COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) operating systems like Unix, CP/M, MS-DOS, or Microsoft Windows. --Brouhaha 18:28, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

It was named Pilot. And the PARC Blue & Whites (the technical reports) mention this. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 17:22, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Microcomputer, not Minicomputer

The first sentence of the article says it is a minicomputer. Minicomputers are the precursor's to today's midrange computers, smaller than mainframes but still client-server architecture. The Alto is a microcomputer, analagous to personal computer or desktop computer which is not a dumb terminal. --64.34.243.218 Peter in Vancouver

• There are varying definitions of minicomputer and microcomputer. The hardware design of the Alto is similar to that of contemporary minicomputers such as the Nova and PDP-11. The term "microcomputer" didn't even exist when the Alto was designed. The most common usage of microcomputer for many years was a computer using a microprocessor as its CPU; the Alto certainly doesn't qualify as a microcomputer with that definition. (However, today even IBM mainframes would qualify as microcomputers with that definition.) --Brouhaha 21:15, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Commercial success

The text refers to "the commercial success of the IBM PC in 1979"... which surely cannot be correct as the IBM PC was not released until 1981. However, I don't know if it was a "success" right from the start. What year should be used in the main article? Drhex (talk) 14:29, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

• This error is still in the text, five months later. Moreover, the only Xerox PC I can find from around that time is the Xerox 820, which was apparently released in 1981. I find it highly unlikely that the 820 was any kind of response to the IBM PC. I'm going to strike the assertion that it was. Metageek (talk) 14:30, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Never a commercial product??

The text says "The Alto was never a commercial product". My memory may be faulty but didn't they sell a boatload of Altos to Boeing? Thethibs (talk) 01:39, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

• The Alto never was a Xerox product,for sure. I was an intern at xerox Parc in the early 80's and never heard of industrial uses of Altos outside Xerox itself. Such a "sale" would have been great publicity for PARC,so it seems unlikely that it would have been kept secret. Aren't you confusng the Alto with some other workststation (Sun, or a later Xerox product)? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 03:53, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Did Apple license the Allto user interface from Xerox?

The article said Xerox only realized their mistake in the early 1980s, after Apple's Macintosh revolutionized the PC market thanks to its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface—both copied from the Alto. An anonymous editor changed copied to bought. Is that true? That is, did Apple ever pay Xerox for the right to use those concepts? AFAIK, the concept of "user interface copyright" did not exist at the time (and it was only thanks to the Alto and its successors that people came to realize the importance of those "decorative details"). All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 16:45, 30 July 2009 (UTC)