Milestone-Proposal:Xerox Alto
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Docket #:2018-10
This Proposal has been approved, and is now a Milestone
To the proposer’s knowledge, is this achievement subject to litigation? No
Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes
Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s designated fields as defined by IEEE Bylaw I-104.11, namely: Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy. Yes
Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes
Was it of at least regional importance? Yes
Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes
Has the IEEE Section(s) in which the plaque(s) will be located agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes
Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes
Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an IEEE Milestone? Yes
Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:
1972 to 1983
Title of the proposed milestone:
The Xerox Alto Establishes Personal Networked Computing, 1972-1983
Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance: Text absolutely limited by plaque dimensions to 70 words; 60 is preferable for aesthetic reasons.
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) researchers developed novel hardware and software for the Xerox Alto computer, setting the model for personal computing for decades. The Alto incorporated a high-resolution display, mouse, and PARC-developed Ethernet networking. Alto software developments in programming languages, graphical user interfaces, printing, graphics, word processing, networking, and email were widely and profoundly influential.
200-250 word abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed, the person(s) involved, historical context, humanitarian and social impact, as well as any possible controversies the advocate might need to review.
IEEE technical societies and technical councils within whose fields of interest the Milestone proposal resides.
In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?
IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section
IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:
IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):
Unit: IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section
Senior Officer Name: Glenn Friedman, Chair, Santa Clara Valley Section
IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:
Unit: IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section
Senior Officer Name: Glenn Friedman
IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):
IEEE Section: IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section
IEEE Section Chair name: Glenn Friedman
Milestone proposer(s):
Proposer name: David Norlander
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public
Proposer name: David Brock
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public
Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.
Street address(es) and GPS coordinates in decimal form of the intended milestone plaque site(s):
Xerox PARC 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto CA, 94304
Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.
Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need. The Xerox PARC facility is the site where the Alto was developed and used by the Xerox PARC staff and where one of the units is on display in the lobby.
Are the original buildings extant?
Yes
Details of the plaque mounting:
The plaque will be mounted in the Xerox PARC facility lobby near the Alto that is on display.
How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?
Security protected lobby, open to public daily 8AM-4:30 PM, 650 812-4000
Who is the present owner of the site(s)?
Xerox PARC
What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)? If personal names are included in citation, include justification here. (see section 6 of Milestone Guidelines)
The concepts included in or pioneered by the Alto hardware and software would dramatically change the personal computing future when they were subsequently incorporated by such companies as Apple (Lisa and Macintosh), Microsoft (Word, Windows), Adobe (Postscript), 3Com (Ethernet), and IBM (Personal Computer). There were many hardware and software innovations that would shape the future of personal computing.
What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?
Before the development of the Alto, the computer market was dominated by costly mainframe and minicomputers with dumb, character based terminals that time-shared the processing time of the computer. The lack of showing different fonts and type styles along with no drawing capability on the normal computer terminal meant creating documents was very difficult. Also, the lack of effective high speed networking among different mainframe computers meant collaboration between people in different facilities was very difficult.
What features set this work apart from similar achievements?
There were both hardware and software features that set this work apart. The display was bit mapped with 606x808 pixels that allowed multiple fonts and type styles such as italics rather than the typical terminal that had an 80 by 24 character only display. The bit-mapped display also allowed the display of graphic images. It also used a three-button mouse and could also have an optional 5-key chorded keyboard. The Alto incorporated user accessible microcode that allowed the use of the same basic hardware for many different applications. Thus, it had many innovative software programs. These included the first “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) document preparation systems, Bravo and Gypsy. Another innovation was the Laurel email tool, and its successor Hardy. It provided the Sil vector graphics editor, used mainly for logic circuits, printed circuit board, and other technical diagrams. It also provided the Markup bitmap editor (an early paint program) and the Draw graphical editor using lines & splines. It provided the first WYSIWYG integrated circuit editor, the first versions of the Smalltalk environment, and Alto Trek, one of the first network-based multi-person video games. It also provided Ethernet connectivity that allowed rapid transfer of information among any of the Alto computers and thus facilitated collaboration among different users. This was a dramatic improvement from a terminal connected to a mainframe trying to transfer data to a different mainframe.
Why was the achievement successful and impactful?
Supporting texts and citations to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or chapters in scholarly books. 'Scholarly' is defined as peer-reviewed, with references, and published. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article. All supporting materials must be in English, or accompanied by an English translation.
"Alto: A Personal Computer” Charles P. Thacker, et al. Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center, 1979.
“Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age”. Michael A. Hiltzik, (1999) HarperCollins ISBN 0-88730-891-0. This book provides a timeline and description of the activities that took place at Xerox PARC during the development of the Alto. It details the efforts of Charles Thacker and the other people involved with the creation of the Alto and the importance of the concepts contained in the Alto hardware and software.
“Alto A Personal Computer Hardware Manual” August 1976, A description of the hardware and the standard microcode.
“This document is a description of the Alto, a small personal computing system originally designed at PARCo By 'personal computer' we mean a non-shared system containing sufficient processing power, storage, and input-output capability to satisfy the computational needs of a single user.”
“The Alto and Ethernet Software” by Butler Lampson 1986 Description of the Alto Ethernet software published in the Association for Computing Machinery journal.
“The personal distributed computing system based on the Alto and the Ethernet was a major effort to make computers help people to think and communicate. The paper describes the complex and diverse collection of software that was built to pursue this goal, ranging from operating systems, programming environments, and communications software to printing and file servers, user interfaces, and applications such as editors, illustrators, and mail systems.”
“The Alto and Ethernet Hardware” by Charles Thacker 1986 Description of the Alto Ethernet hardware published in the Association for Computing Machinery journal.
“Between 1972 and 1980, the first distributed personal computing system was built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The system was composed of a number of Alto workstations connected by an Ethernet local network. It also included servers that provided centralized facilities. This paper describes the development of the hardware that was the basis of the system.”
“The Xerox Alto Computer”, Thomas A. Wadlow, Page 58, Byte Magazine, September 1981. This article confirms the Alto as the beginning of the personal computer as an important tool for research. “In 1972, Xerox Corporation decided to produce a personal computer for research. The result was the Alto computer, whose name comes from the Xerox Palo Also Research Center where it was developed. The Alto was the result of a joint effort by Ed McCreight, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs, who were attempting to make a device that was small enough to fit in an office comfortably, but powerful enough to support a reliable, high quality operating system and graphics display. Their goal was to provide each user with a personal computing facility capable of meeting all individual needs and a communications facility that would allow users to share information easily. In 1978 Xerox donated a total of fifty Altos to Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). These machines were quickly assimilated into the research community and rapidly became the standard against which other personal computers were judged.”
“The Alto and Ethernet System Xerox PARC in the 1970’s”, Butler Lampson, Microsoft Research, October 17, 2006
“Troublemakers Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age” Leslie Berlin, 2017 Simon & Shuster pages 101-106, 221-224 ISBN 978-1-4516-5150-8. In this book Leslie Berlin tells the story of the Alto and the men who produced it. One of the items to note is the following excerpt: “The flagship software program on the Alto was a word processing program called Bravo. (Its writer, Charles Simonyi, would later move to Microsoft, where Bravo became the design influence for Microsoft Word.)
Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.
Alto: A Personal Computer. Charles P. Thacker, et al. Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center, 1979. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Alto_A_Personal_Computer.pdf
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Michael A. Hiltzik, (1999) HarperCollins ISBN 0-88730-891-0. This book provides a timeline and description of the activities that took place at Xerox PARC during the development of the Alto. It details the efforts of Charles Thacker and the other people involved with the creation of the Alto and the importance of the concepts contained in the Alto hardware and software. https://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Alto: A Personal Computer Hardware Manual. August 1976, A description of the hardware and the standard microcode. “This document is a description of the Alto, a small personal computing system originally designed at PARC. By 'personal computer' we mean a non-shared system containing sufficient processing power, storage, and input-output capability to satisfy the computational needs of a single user.” http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/Alto_Hardware_Manual_Aug76.pdf
“The Alto and Ethernet Software.” Butler Lampson, 1986. Description of the Alto Ethernet software published in the Association for Computing Machinery journal. “The personal distributed computing system based on the Alto and the Ethernet was a major effort to make computers help people to think and communicate. The paper describes the complex and diverse collection of software that was built to pursue this goal, ranging from operating systems, programming environments, and communications software to printing and file servers, user interfaces, and applications such as editors, illustrators, and mail systems.” http://www.bwlampson.site/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html
“The Alto and Ethernet Hardware.” Charles Thacker, 1986. Description of the Alto Ethernet hardware published in the Association for Computing Machinery journal. “Between 1972 and 1980, the first distributed personal computing system was built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The system was composed of a number of Alto workstations connected by an Ethernet local network. It also included servers that provided centralized facilities. This paper describes the development of the hardware that was the basis of the system.” https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/readings/Thacker.Alto.Hardware.pdf
“The Xerox Alto Computer,” Thomas A. Wadlow, Page 58, Byte Magazine, September 1981. This article confirms the Alto as the beginning of the personal computer as an important tool for research. “In 1972, Xerox Corporation decided to produce a personal computer for research. The result was the Alto computer, whose name comes from the Xerox Palo Also Research Center where it was developed. The Alto was the result of a joint effort by Ed McCreight, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs, who were attempting to make a device that was small enough to fit in an office comfortably, but powerful enough to support a reliable, high quality operating system and graphics display. Their goal was to provide each user with a personal computing facility capable of meeting all individual needs and a communications facility that would allow users to share information easily. In 1978 Xerox donated a total of fifty Altos to Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). These machines were quickly assimilated into the research community and rapidly became the standard against which other personal computers were judged.” https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-09/page/n59
“The Alto and Ethernet System Xerox PARC in the 1970’s,” Butler Lampson, Microsoft Research, October 17, 2006. http://www.bwlampson.site/Slides/AltoAtPARCIn1970s.pdf
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age. Leslie Berlin, 2017, Simon & Shuster, pages 101-106, 221-224 ISBN 978-1-4516-5150-8. In this book Leslie Berlin tells the story of the Alto and the men who produced it. One of the items to note is the following excerpt: “The flagship software program on the Alto was a word processing program called Bravo. (Its writer, Charles Simonyi, would later move to Microsoft, where Bravo became the design influence for Microsoft Word.)” https://www.amazon.com/Troublemakers-Silicon-Valleys-Coming-Age-ebook/dp/B06ZZ1YDTX#reader_B06ZZ1YDTX
Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.
“Yesterday’s Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto.” Computer History Museum event. November 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m_GhapEBLQ
Xerox Alto Source Code https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/
1972 commercial for the Xerox Alto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjvSWCQVpJ0
Video ethnography of ICARUS on Xerox Alto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BauuOoB6EIU&t=5s
Video ethnography of GYPSY on Xerox Alto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhmz68CII9Y
Video ethnography of SMALLTALK on Xerox Alto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg&t=2844s
Alto Operating System Reference Manual. Description of the Alto operating system compiled in 1980 at PARC. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/memos_1975/Alto_Operating_System_Reference_Manual_Jun75.pdf
Bravo Manual. Bravo was the first What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) word processing program. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/BravoXMan.pdf
Gypsy Operators Handbook. Document publishing program for the Alto. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/gypsy/Gypsy_Operators_Handbook_May1978.pdf
Markup Users Manual. Markup is an Alto program for document illustration. Its basic purpose is to permit you to add illustrations to an existing formatted text document. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/alto/Alto_Users_Handbook_Sep79.pdf
Alto Users Handbook. September 1979. Provides instructions for non-programmers on the use of the Alto. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/alto/Alto_Users_Handbook_Sep79.pdf
Xerox Inter-Office Memorandum from Butler Lampson, “Why Alto?” December 12, 1972. In this document, Butler provides this statement about the performance of the Alto: “The system is capable of doing almost any computation which a PDP-10 can do. For most problems it can deliver better performance to the user than a time-shared 10, even if the latter is lightly loaded.” http://www.bwlampson.site/38a-WhyAlto/Acrobat.pdf
Please email a jpeg or PDF a letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property, and a letter (or forwarded email) from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application to ieee-history@ieee.org with the subject line "Attention: Milestone Administrator." Note that there are multiple texts of the letter depending on whether an IEEE organizational unit other than the section will be paying for the plaque(s).
Please recommend reviewers by emailing their names and email addresses to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please include the docket number and brief title of your proposal in the subject line of all emails.