17 Feb
2007
17 Feb
'07
1:15 p.m.
Thanks Al...
I thought Kearns (then CEO of Xerox) had received the Alto III
proposal. I wonder if there is anything still floating around out
there that maybe one of the Xerox guys may still have. So the Alto
II XM did in hw what "Ooze" did in software?
Just to think, if Star or a more commercialized version of the Alto
could've made it out just a few years earlier, what things would be like
today. I wonder if we'd all be picking on Xerox instead of MS....
though, I don't think there would've been the BsoD ;-) Though we may
have all had color laser printers on our desktops 10 years earlier if
the Proto color laser had been perfected.
Curt
Al Kossow wrote:
There is no written documentation I have ever come across that
there was ever anything called an Alto III.
The only follow on to the Alto II was the Alto II XM, which added
bank switched memory and a larger writable control store.
Alto II was a redesign of some of the Alto I for manufacturability
done in El Segundo.
Chuck Thacker did the "Dolphin", which was the first Xerox OIS
workstation. The 8010 is an adaptation of a paper design that
Butler Lampson did called "Wildflower"
The next machine Chuck worked on after the Dolphin was the
Dorado.