- While this is an uplifting story about trusting in destiny, the real source of this computerized “wonderful typography” is the Xerox Alto computer, built by Xerox PARC in 1973. The Alto was a revolutionary system, one of the first to use a high-resolution bitmapped display, a GUI, and an optical mouse. The first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor was created at Xerox PARC in 1974 by Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson and other Xerox researchers. The Alto system supported many high-quality fonts, including proportionally spaced fonts with ligatures.1 Xerox PARC also invented the laser printer in 1971, allowing high-resolution documents to be printed.