07-17-2019, 08:02 PM
(07-17-2019, 05:49 PM)martyup Wrote: It's nice to see that these same guys are restoring a Xerox Altos computer. I had the fortune to have access to one of those in the Comp Sci building and wrote most of my term papers on it. There was a 500 pound Diablo laser printer two floors down that would output jobs from the Altos. This was cutting edge technology. You could actually change the font of text and draw pictures with a thing they called a "mouse."
For some reason Xerox did not see the value of the Altos computer and (IIRC) gave it away to two guys building computers in their garage. It eventually became the Macintosh computer and changed the world.
Alto, not Altos.
Xerox didn't literally give away the Alto to Apple. Xerox made an attempt to commercialize an Alto derivative as the Xerox Star, but it wasn't a success. Too expensive, for one thing. Apple copied many of the ideas in the Lisa, which was also too expensive but at least got attention. Then of course we all know how successful their second attempt, the Macintosh, turned out to be.