- Inside the vintage Xerox Alto’s display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working (righto.com)
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightbulb that caused the display to fail in a strange way. For those just tuning in, the Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973 to investigate personal computing. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, WYSIWYG editors, Ethernet and laser printers to the world, among other things.
- Fixing the Ethernet board from a vintage Xerox Alto (righto.com)
A Xerox Alto system on the East coast had Ethernet problems, so the owner sent me the Ethernet board to diagnose. (After restoring our Alto, we’ve heard from a couple other Alto owners and try to help them out.) This blog post describes how I repaired the board and explains a bit about how the Alto’s groundbreaking Ethernet worked.
- The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and rewriting a running GUI (righto.com)
We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintage Xerox Alto; this blog post gives a quick overview of the Smalltalk environment. One unusual feature of Smalltalk is you can view and modify the system’s code while the system is running. I demonstrate this by modifying the scrollbar code on a running system.
- Steve Jobs, the Xerox Alto, and computer typography (righto.com)
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.