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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.
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 ...
The Altos 486 was however based on an 8-MHz Intel 80186 processor and also ran Xenix. It was however cheaper than their 586. [23] Altos 886, 1086, and 2086. Based on a 80286 central processor, and intended to support 8, 10, and respectively 20 users at terminals. The 886 used a 7.5 MHz processor, while in the other two it ran at 8 MHz. [24]
Because the impetus for the RISC-V development was the paucity of open-source processor designs for the RAMP project (both Asanovic and Patterson were PIs), it is fitting that Thacker played a role in this important future technology. Thacker died of complications from esophageal cancer on June 12, 2017, in Palo Alto, California, aged 74. [15]
While the Alto had been a mere curiosity for Xerox, Jobs saw a huge amount of potential in the graphical interface, and immediately after returning to Apple's headquarters, set his team on creating a similar graphical user interface for their first product, the Apple Lisa, incorporating additional information provided by Xerox, later refined ...
Gypsy was the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface to take advantage of those technologies to virtually eliminate modes.Its operation would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer.
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 mid-to-late 1980s saw the spread of laser printers, a "typographic" approach to word processing, and of true WYSIWYG bitmap displays with multiple fonts (pioneered by the Xerox Alto computer and Bravo word processing program), PostScript, and graphical user interfaces (another Xerox PARC innovation, with the Gypsy word processor which was ...