Xerox Alto
Latest
Exhibition lets you go hands-on with 40 years of gadgets
Want to experience exactly how much gadgets have evolved in the last 40 years? The Interface Experience at the Bard Graduate Center in New York has more than 25 seminal devices representing different computing eras, including the graphical interface grand-daddy Xerox Alto and the Macintosh Plus from 1986. Exhibit-goers will even get to try out five featured devices for themselves: a 1982 Commodore 64, the Mac Plus, a Palm Pilot circa 1997, and the original iPad and Microsoft Kinect, both from 2010. There's also a "petting zoo" wall of 100-plus cellphones across several decades that can be touched and tried out.
Weird and amazing Macs that aren't exactly Macs
If you haven't heard of the upcoming 1984-2014 Maciversary, well either you aren't paying attention or perhaps you have an actual life. Us? We've been going back and forth talking about this thing for the last month. And one of our most contentious issues involves what exactly counts as a Mac. Some systems are obviously Macs. This? This is a Mac. It's a happy Mac! This? This is not a Mac. It's an Apple II. And while many laypersons might not be able to differentiate between a Mac and an Apple II ("Most people now don't know the difference between an Apple and a Mac. Maybe the people reading our site, yes, but not an actual layman.") we can state for certain that this is completely and utterly not a Mac. This is a Macquarium, a phrase coined by Andy Ihnatko. It is not a Mac, although it is compatible with Objective Sea Life. This, on the other hand is basically a Mac. It's an Apple Lisa, the personal computer that preceded the Macintosh. In fact, the ultimate Lisa was sold as the Macintosh XL. The Lisa offered many of the same user interface features as the Mac and was targeted toward business users. This too, is basically a Mac.It's a Xerox Alto, designed at Xerox PARC and dates back to the early 1970s. It used a mouse-driven GUI-based system, and more or less inspired Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs during a site tour. It provided many of the same look and feel strengths that later showed up on the Mac. This is also basically a Mac. It is a NeXT cube. You don't see a screen in this image from Wikipedia, but if it were connected, you'd recognize a lot of the OS. That's because the NeXT basically ran OS X. It only took a bit over a decade for that technology to return to Apple after Jobs went on a quick run out to pick up some nacho chips and started a brand-new company before returning to Apple with orange fingers and the beginnings of OS X. While he was gone, someone at Apple built this. It's not a Mac. It's not even close to being a Mac. But eventually it inspired people who got around to shoving Mac's OS X operating system onto the iPhone (which, too, is a Mac). This is, of course, not to be confused with these, which are also Newtons but which offer far less computational efficiency. Certainly, this is not an exhaustive list of what is and is not a Mac. There were Power Computing Macs, Hackintoshes, retro bubble Macs, extremely beige Mac IIs and many, many more. All of them properly Macs. Today, we own our impossibly thin MacBook Airs, our super powerful Retina Pros and our beloved Mac minis. Here's looking forward to the next 30 years of Mac. Do you have any strong opinions on what is and is not a Mac? Share them in the comments. All images are courtesy of Wikipedia.
Meet your desktop's ancestors: AT&T exhumes footage of the Bell Blit (video)
AT&T's video archives are rich seams of juicy historical tidbits, and today's offering is a fine example. It's sharing footage of the Bell Blit, a graphic interface that Bell Labs developed after being inspired by the Xerox Alto. Originally named the Jerq, it was created by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi to have the same usability as the Alto, but with "the processing power of a 1981 computer." Watch, as the narrator marvels at being able to use multiple windows at once, playing Asteroids while his debugging software runs in the background on that futuristic green-and-black display. The next time we get annoyed that Crysis isn't running as fast as you'd like it to, just remember how bad the geeks of yesteryear had it.
Computing pioneer Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award
Chuck Thacker may not be quite the same household name as some other computing pioneers, but it's pretty hard to overstate the influence he's had on the industry, a feat for which he's now be honored with the A.M. Turing Award -- widely considered to be the "Nobel prize of computing." While Thacker is now a "Technical Fellow" at Microsoft, he first made a name for himself at Xerox PARC, where he not only helped design and realize the very first modern computer, the Alto, but co-invented Ethernet, and contributed to a range of other projects that have had a lasting impact on computing to this day. Later, while at Microsoft Reseach, Thacker oversaw the design of the very first Tablet PC prototypes, and he continues to lead up a computer-architecture group at the company and be involved with various research efforts. Of course, that's only scratching the surface -- hit up the links below for a more complete background of the man's work, and head on past the break for a short video put together for the occasion by Microsoft.
