Kay's point at the time is that this was what you could do if you were willing to spend a large amount of money per user on hardware. It wasn't cost-effective yet. Someday it would be. Xerox was willing to spend the money, so when the hardware became available, they'd own the market.
This wasn't the first GUI. They'd downsized the 1968 Mother of All Demos to a machine that sat alongside a desk.[1] When Engelbart did that, it required a room-sized mainframe, a video link from the mainframe to the demo site (a very big deal in 1968), and a sizable crew of support people to keep it all running. All to support one user.
This technology reached production with the introduction of "workstations". The first was the Terak, in 1977, which ran an interpretive environment called the UCSD P-System. This was a byte code interpreter for Pascal. Fast compile, slow execution, basic graphics. Perhaps the ancestor to Turbo Pascal for DOS. PDP-11 technology underneath. I used one briefly. 1979 brought the Three Rivers PERQ, which was a lot like an Alto and sold as a commercial product. It had another 16-bit CPU inside, from ICL in the UK, and was another interpretive Pascal system. I never saw one; it was considered something of a dud.
When the Motorola 68000 came out, it was clear to a lot of people that there was finally a big enough microprocessor to build a workstation. At last, a 32-bit address space. (Or at least 24; early machines didn't use the high byte.) The Apollo Domain, in 1980, was the first of those. That was the first real workstation. It had its own OS, its own networking (a coax token ring), its own file system (exclusive use locking across the network worked, unlike UNIX), and its own GUI. Apollo had their own MMU and their own paging system, which was really hard due to the M68000 not handling page faults properly. It was way ahead of anything else at the time. But the small organization behind it just had too much work to do building all that software and hardware. When I used one, it was clear this was the future, but it wasn't there yet.
Then came Sun, and a whole slew of UNIX workstations. UNIX was really the wrong tool for the job, but it was available and cheap. (Not yet free.)
Meanwhile, Apple was trying to get a low-end workstation working. The Apple Lisa (1983) was the result. It was sort of a cost-reduced Apollo - its own OS, its own MMU (a whole board, which ran the price up), and its own GUI. Also its own disk drive, the one time Apple tried to build a hard drive in house. That didn't go well. The Lisa was impressive and useful, but it cost too much to go mass market. The real UNIX workstations came with big screens, and the Lisa had a dinky screen like DOS-type computers. Meanwhile, IBM was eating Apple's lunch, replacing the obsolete Apple II with dumb DOS machines. No GUI, but enough compute power to run a spreadsheet and, importantly, a hard drive. Now people could do basic business work.
Apple's response, the Macintosh, was the world's greatest toy computer. It shipped in 1984 with 128K of RAM, one floppy drive (you needed two to get anything done), an operating system with no CPU dispatcher, no memory protection, and a nice GUI. But no hard drive. It was really slow and spent most of its time reading floppies and displaying an hourglass "wait" icon. It almost killed Apple. Sales were very low; Apple had planned to sell about 47,000 units a month, but only sold about 5,000. What saved Apple was the first desktop laser printer, the LaserWriter, in 1985. (PARC had a laser printer in the mid-1970s, but it was based on a big copier engine and bigger than a desk.) In 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus, which could, at last, support an external hard drive. That was the first successful product in the line, and launched the desktop publishing industry.
In parallel to all this, there was another line of technology, now forgotten - "word processing". Wang and IBM were the big players in this. This started with typewriters with some memory, around 1971, and by 1977, Wang had the Wang Office Information System. This involved many semi-dumb terminals connected to a shared unit with a CPU and file server. Those could in turn be networked, and documents sent around the system. Very cost-effective, because each terminal was cheap. This was a huge win for offices which did a lot of document preparation, and Wang was, for a while, a very successful company.
So Xerox tried to move into that space with the Xerox Star, in 1981. This brought the Alto technology into an office environment. Worked fine, cost too much. Like the Wang system, it was very closed. This was deliberate. Word processing and office system were used by secretaries and clerks. They had to Just Work. Exposing end users to the internal complexity of the system was considered a bad idea.
The cultural change which brought system administration to the masses wasn't seen coming. It was inconceivable in the early 1980s that clerical people and small business operators would have to worry about what was going on inside the box. But as the DOS-type machines got more powerful and moved into offices, for about two decades everyone had to become a sysadmin. Apple tried to hide more under the covers, but it didn't really work all that well in the early years.
Today, of course, the complexity has mostly been put back in a sealed box, and you can give a Chromebook type tablet to a 5 year old and they'll be able to work it.
(The price of RAM was a big problem in those days. All the early DOS machines and Macs were RAM-starved. The workstation people plowed through that problem with money, and RAM was a big fraction of machine cost. Now it takes a gigabyte to run Hello World, but, whatever.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#MIPS
Smalltalk started working in 1972, the Alto in 1973, and Smalltalk on it a month or so after the Alto came alive. The GUI came more from other parts of ARPA than NLS, but there were a few NLS elements. Cheers.
Brilliant programmer/hacker, tech/User experience visionary, and a corporate operator chief.
Xerox systems were complete and readily usable, but too expensive. Jobs simply tried to make something similar but cheaper. First, Jobs failed as well (Apple Lisa), then the Mac was easier to sell due to being lower priced. But the Mac also didn't sell well at the beginning; it started selling well after Jobs was fired, paradoxically.
Agree, but that doesn't sell as many books or movies I guess.
http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-r...
"Dealers of Lightning" also a has a chapter on Job's visit: https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer... Try the "look inside" for "Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell".
Maybe this is a difference between someone totally focused on feel and experience versus pure computer science.
Many of the GUI ideas had been around in the ARPA community before Parc, including scrolling. The bit-map display on the Alto brought a few more possibilities -- such as the overlapping windows, and "display any image". We had done both smooth scrolling and outlined text selection years before (remember that
Steve's visit was in the 6th year of the Alto working). We used the line by line scrolling in Smalltalk in '79 in part because it was easier to read during the movement, and because a list would always show the whole top line). There was plenty of compute power to do either.
What Steve was reacting against is the normal way we portray selections today, namely highlighting (not at all what you said above). We found the highlighted selection to be more discernable than the outline.
I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums.
Is there a document that shows the differences between The Smalltalk-78 and Smalltalk-80, and what made Smalltalk-80 worse?
I think it's okay for the guys who invented the GUI to also get a small fist bump.
I tend to think if you take Jobs, or Gates, or any other icon out of the picture, somebody else would have filled the void. And the end state might be slightly different, but not that much. Maybe Kildall, CP/M, and GEM would have filled part of the Apple void, for example.
Jobs defined how the mass market 8-bit computers looked for example[1]. GEM wouldn't exist without the Mac, and well, CP/M was actually the first choice but some people have one bad day.
If the giants of the industry didn't exist then we'd be living in an alternate reality with different pillars to support later people. I often think about Rome. They had all the technology to move to something like the steam engine. Maybe someone in the empire got close and just had some bad days, but it never really got done until much later. People who see something different are not interchangeable. You might get close, but all the experience that brought someone to a point isn't going to be duplicated. Parallel inventions happen, but even they are not exact duplicates (e.g. a different notation for Calculus).
1) it is almost a iPhone type display on how 8-bit computers looked before the Apple ][ and then after. This is no way says anything about my opinion of which 8-bit computer was the best.
At some point, "luck" ceases to be a particularly viable hypothesis.
Because virtually every single desktop or mobile UI in the world—including Mac and iOS—does the Smalltalk thing and highlights the text, not the Jobs thing to put a box outline around it.
This is embarrassingly unrepentant idol worship.
2. Pixel by pixel scrolling is, but that it was done line-by-line on the Xerox computer could have been a deliberate performance concession for this 70s era hardware. Redrawing large sections of the screen over and over (for every pixel of scroll) was very slow by modern standards and not redrawing every pixel was often preferable on those systems even if you could do it.
- it's what the user wants to feel quickly: beauty (it drives sales also)
- it's not what the user wants to have: understanding (it's .. non existent for a commercial market)
both are true, still the elusion of the underlying layer saddens me to no end.
Another example: the copy key, in mainstream OSes you copy some text, in PARC OS, you copy an object, the whole graph; it's life altering in capabilities and simplicity. It even has a dedicated key !
This analogy is not guaranteed. No refunds.
"once windows are created they overlap on the screen like sheets of paper"
As we turn computers into android robots, its clear that the credit never belong to man himself. The Wonderful idea was already known by God, who gave man the sense to emulate a good thing.
