From Prototype To Necessity
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday May 6, 2003
The personal computer turned 30 last month. The first PC, the Alto, was developed at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Centre, home of the graphic user interface, laser printer and peer-to-peer computing. The Alto, a prototype never produced in commercial quantities, had a vertically oriented, bit-mapped screen so pages could be laid out as they appeared in print, 64K RAM (expandable to 256K), a 10MB hard disc, mouse and the GUI. It was linked to a local area network using the Ethernet 10Mbps networking protocol. The son of Alto, the Xerox 8010 ``Star" office system, went into production on April 27, 1981 and about 2000 were sold. The original machines were envisaged as proving grounds for theories on distributed computing, graphics architectures and programming. Games quickly found their way on to the Alto. Apart from chess, some of the most successful were ports of games from the '70s and '80s including Asteroids, Galaxians Trek and Missile Command.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald