Home computing was spreading quickly in the early 1980s. Such historic computers as the Apple ][, Commodore 64, and IBM PC had already been released. However, with the debut of the Macintosh in 1984, things took another leap towards ubiquity as the vast majority of users were introduced to features like the graphical user interface (GUI) and “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) document editing. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 shortly after and later versions would eventually become the dominant home/office GUI. Computing history buffs know that these features started well before Apple and Microsoft were involved, though. It really entered the personal computing space with the creation of the Xerox Alto, the machine that inspired the creation of the Mac and Windows.
The Alto was not sold commercially, but a who’s who of computing history names like Charles P. Thacker, Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Charles Simonyi and many more, worked on the Alto or its software at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Living Computers: Museum + Labs has maintained a working (barring a few occasional repair periods) Xerox Alto for guest use. The purpose is to show off a computer that used features that shaped later machines- GUI, WYSIWYG, the mouse, object-oriented programming- yet was created over a decade prior to the Mac and even before the less sophisticated home machines of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. That didn’t satisfy our team fully, as there was another huge innovation that took place during Alto development- Ethernet networking. Since we had another Alto, our collection held the first key to displaying that innovation in our museum. After the second Alto was restored by LCM+L’s Engineers, the machines were hooked up, allowing visitors to communicate and (more importantly!) play Maze War against one another.
However, our Engineering Team wasn’t done there. We wanted to do something in line with the original purpose of the museum (originating in the PDP Planet era) make this system accessible online. Unlike most of our other online systems, we wanted to make something different. Senior Vintage Software Developer Josh Dersch created an emulator for the Alto, and LCM+L founder Paul Allen introduced it to the world on August 2, 2016. ContrAlto allows you to not only emulate an Alto, but network with Altos and ContrAlto emulators via a 3mb Ethernet bridge created and housed here at LCM+L. We released ContrAlto and the source code on our GitHub account, and encourage users to make it better. We also took ContrAlto to the Vintage Computer Festival West to show it off to the kinds of people who would appreciate it the most.
As LCM+L grows into a hub for all types of computing technology, guests are sure to look to history for inspiration like Allen, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did with the Alto. There are many examples in this museum of concepts that were ahead of their time, or close to ready but missing an element, only to reemerge later as something commercially successful. It is with the perspective that computing builds upon itself that we highlight working examples of historic machines. Enabling visitors to interact with networked Xerox Altos within our walls, and with ContrAlto emulators from a distance, is one way to keep the past as a living inspiration.
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