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The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers , and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing.
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The ideas led to the development of the Xerox Alto prototype, which was originally called "the interim Dynabook". [8] [9] [10] It embodied all the elements of a graphical user interface, or GUI, as early as 1972. The software component of this research was Smalltalk, which went on to have a life of its own independent of the Dynabook concept.
By 1973, the Xerox Alto was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal which Engelbart had demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse-driven GUI , the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple 's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s. [ 23 ]
The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium". [18] STEPS is a recursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel ...
While at PARC, Tesler's work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software.
BravoX was "modeless", as was Gypsy. While Bravo (and BravoX) were originally implemented in BCPL for the Xerox Alto, BravoX was later re-implemented in a language called "Butte" ("a Butte is a small Mesa", as Charles Simonyi used to say). Alto BCPL compiled into Data General Nova machine instructions, which were in turn interpreted by Alto ...
Altos Computer Systems was founded in 1977 by David G. Jackson and Roger William Vass Sr. It focused on small multi-user computers, starting with multi-user derivatives of CP/M, and later including Unix and Xenix-based machines.