Xerox's Missed Opportunity: The Rise and Fall of the Xerox Star

Описание: #xerox #alto
They invented the concept of a personal computer but simply gave the idea away to Apple and Steve Jobs, and later Microsoft. When revenues from the copier business grew to a very profitable $1 billion-plus annually. A Xerox center for computer research, located in Palo Alto, was created. It would be known as Xerox PARC. The computer the team at PARC ended up building was the Xerox Alto, the computer that laid the foundation for the modern computing world. The Xerox Alto was a computer designed to support a Graphical User Interface based operating system in the year 1973 a full decade before the first mass market GUI based computers would be released.

Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos had been put into operation at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices. In 1977 three personal computers including the Apple 2 were launched, they were all great successes and began the personal computing revolution. Xerox ran a commercial for a computer but it wasn’t the Alto instead it was the Xerox Star.

Members of the Lisa engineering team saw a presentation of the Xerox Star in early 1981 and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Several members of PARC were also recruited to Microsoft where they were instrumental in the creation of Microsoft Word and the Windows operating system.