- 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.
- A blast from the past: Disassembling DOS (softwarelitigationconsulting.com)
from Undocumented DOS: A Programmer’s Guide to Reserved MS-DOS Functions and Data Structures (2nd edition, 1994. Copyright (c) Andrew Schulman 1994-2020. All rights reserved. [This nearly-ancient text (along with others from Undocumented DOS and Undocumented Windows) is being presented as a case study in some methodologies of software reverse engineering, applied to mass-market software. Note that this chapter appeared in the 2nd edition of the book, not in the 1st edition.]
- 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.
- Xerox Alto (Wikipedia)
The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. The advances include graphical user interface (GUI), computer mouse, Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of the first computers to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems.