The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month
Our former vulture Tony also mentioned something else important: the Alto wasn't a flop, as it's sometime called, because it wasn't a commercial product in the first place. Its successor thewas the flop, not the Alto. The other thing about the later machine that's often overlooked is that it was the Star that introduced the. The Alto had no"desktop", and indeed, almost no elements of the familiar GUI we all know today.
The third significant thing about the Alto was that it was the machine that made object-oriented programming mainstream. These were the three significant aspects of the machine: the first GUI PC, the first networked PC, and the machine that drove OOPS into the mainstream. That is according to Steve Jobs, anyway:
They showed me, really, three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't 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. They had over 100 Alto computers all networked, using e-mail, etc., etc. I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface.
The programming language that came directly out of the Alto project was Smalltalk, although the Alto itself wasn't programmed in it., better known as the language that begat C. As that article also describes, Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal language, spent two sabbaticals at PARC. The first visit led him to create Modula-2, and the second one, Modula-2's descendant Oberon,
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