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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers 145

Posted by timothy from the can-only-ascribe-to-blatant-favoritism dept.
mccalli writes "The National Academy of Engineering has awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize to various individuals 'for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers.' The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing."
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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers More

NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers

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  • More Info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Joceyln Parfitt ( 756037 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:52PM (#8389211)
    A more detailed timeline for the awards is available here [nae.edu]

    Alltogether there are five of them, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the Founders Award, and the Arthur M. Bueche Award

  • Wasn't the NAE just mentioned... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...recently as a terrorist organization. I'd hate to see those PARC people get hurt.

  • Recognition (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SabrStryk ( 323739 ) <{moc.rr.anilorac} {ta} {kyrtsrbas}> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:58PM (#8389305)
    It's good that contributors to the early days of computing are being recognized; I'm sure everyone here understands what it means to do good work and never get a nod for it. At the same time, it comes too late to have a strong impact on careers. Perhaps this is good; the individuals cited in the article seem to have a made a name for themselves in other work as well, and have not been judged solely on their earlier work.

    Another thing I would like to see is a more mainstream news source to pick up this story, even if it's a small sidebar; the general populace recognizes names like Jobs and Gates, but a much smaller percentage (including myself) knows of the other, less business-oriented figures in the industry.

  • Good to see originators getting credit. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rebeka thomas ( 673264 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:58PM (#8389306)
    So often I see credit for "the gui" going to Apple, when it's these guys who should be getting the real credit. More work in GUI design, more original thought and more of the first hard yards in GUI systems were put in by the Alto originators than Apple's work, which was just in mass marketing an already existing product.

    Kudos to them I say

    • Re:Good to see originators getting credit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:08PM (#8389420)
      Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since. Two button mouse anyone? i don't see apple catching up there.
      • i don't see apple catching up there.

        Amen. While the single-button might be "less intimidating," Apple has really left that image behind. Now it's more of a "computer for hip people. you wanna be hip? buy apple." Even hip people can use two buttons. And Apple has enough of a design staff that they could build a work-of-art pointing device with 6 buttons that also made you coffee while you waited.

        I understand that a USB mouse from another manufacturer works; my point is that if it's not standard, the
        • I understand that a USB mouse from another manufacturer works; my point is that if it's not standard, there's less of an incentive to write for it.


          Except that in OS X cntl-click and right-click are the same thing. So the functionality is standard regardless of mouse config. As far as I can tell, every app on my machine exploits this functionality.
        • I understand that a USB mouse from another manufacturer works; my point is that if it's not standard, there's less of an incentive to write for it.
          The problem is that you can't just replace the pointing device in a laptop with one that has more buttons - USB mice don't really cut it when you don't have a flat surface to put them on (although I suppose you could attach a USB trackball to the side with duct tape).
        • A Single button mouse is more efficient.

          The Mac was designed to make workers more efficient, and studies showed, and have shown since then, that the single button mouse lets you get work done faster.

          I know you guys will never believe it, but its objective fact.

          Oh, and UT2k3 runs great on a mac-- better graphics than I've seen on the PC.

          Why is it you guys have to use ignorance (of mice) or lies to bash the mac? Oh, I know-- cause you know that macs are superior.

          And you're pissed that you paid more mone
          • What studies? How can it possibly be more efficient? In either case, you click. In the multi-button case, you right-click based on your intuitive assumption that you want an 'alternate' action to happen.

            Cite your sources.

            • IT is not intuitive to right click for the "altertnative" fucntion.

              Apple tried 2 and 3 button mice while developing the mac and found that they slowed people down. In the late 80s the topic came up again and I saw independant studies that showed the same thing.

              With a one button mouse, you jsut click-- its intuitive.

              With 2 or more buttons, you have to think and click.

              It slows you down measurably-- eg: doing the same tasks takes longer for the same people.

              • at the time of those studies, mice (and GUI interfaces, for that matter) were relatively new to people. i think the results would be quite different now. the complexity of a multi-button mouse may be a little tricky for a complete newbie, but it IS intuitive.

                think about it- you can do multiple things with your hands: grasp, twist, point, etc. having multiple mouse buttons is a similar concept. i've got a logitech MX 700 at home and when i come to work where i don't have the forward/back buttons on the thum
                • The decision to go with a one-button mouse on the Mac didn't have anything to do with studies. The original Mac was slated for a two-button mouse until the later stages of deveopment, when they realized they hadn't used the second button in the GUI at all.

                  Several ex-PARC people were involved with the original Mac at a very early stage, and the PARC Star system used a two-button mouse (and movable, overlapping windows, and pop-up menus). About the only serious GUI innovation the Mac made over the Star was

              • Again, CITE YOUR SOURCES.

                I call hogwash. I'll bet dollars to donuts it's simply not true. When I can accomplish the same function, without engaging full motion of my other arm, moving my eyes from the screen to the keyboard, etc., I am much more efficient than with a single click.

                I'm not a Mac basher, but saying that one button is more efficient is just blatant zealotry.
          • A) UT2k3 runs under x86/x86-64 Linux. B) UT2k3 does not run under PPC/PPC64 Linux. Thus, I'll stick with my Athlon, thank you.
      • Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since.

        In May, 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, an expensive personal computer with a GUI, multitasking, memory protection, and virtual memory. See this page [sunder.net], check out my screenshots [stepleton.com], or just use Google.

        It wasn't a success, but it did beat the Amiga to market. As if that matters.

        Two button mouse anyone? i don't see apple catchi
      • Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since.

        Sorry. Bzzt. Wrong.

        Hi Toro was founded by two engineers who had just finished the design of one of the semicustom ASIC chips necessary to complete the first 128k Mac prototype (check the case signatures and names on the earliest Amiga patents if you don't believe this). Also the Apple Lisa, which had a complete multitasking

    • Yeah, Apple only invented trivial things like drag n' drop and pull down menus. The Mac was far from an Alto copy. Ask two guys who worked at both PARC and Apple [smalltalkconsulting.com] (OK, Raskin didn't officially work at PARC. He just hung out there while teaching at Stanford.)
      • These people just want to stick to their "Apple is evil" matra which is based on the fact that Apple sells software, and selling is evil to them.

        Here's some pictures of the Alto's "GUI":
        http://www.digibarn.com/collections/softwa re/alto/ index.html

        Notice that there are no windows. They invetned the box for grouping controls, but no windowing system. No desktop metaphore, etc.

        Xerox moved things forward with great basic research, but Apple invented the GUI.
    • I remember reading that Edgar Dykstra and his students did an early GUI machine, but I've never been sure where it fit into the overall timeline.

      It's been long enough that the details were fuzzy, but they did a new language for it at the same time. Possibly Modula-2.

      • Lilith (Score:2, Informative)

        by Jecel Assumpcao Jr ( 5602 )
        You might be thinking of the Lilith [modulaware.com] by N. Wirth. Modula-2 was created for this graphical machine, which was inspired by actually using the Xerox Alto for a year (so it is a later development).
    • The idea that Apple just took what was on Xerox's table is nothing more than a modern myth - accepted and passed down as Gospel by those unwilling to dig for facts. Many GUI innovations were developed inside Apple; its interface pioneers were led by Jef Raskin [jefraskin.com]. I cannot summarise this historical error better than Jef himself [slashdot.org]:

      It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. For one thing the usual account (as in Levy'

  • Two ex-xerox people huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bryan Gividen ( 739949 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:59PM (#8389309)
    The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people...

    Headling which was a prelude to this one...

    Two Xerox Employees Fired Over Butt-Copying Incident, footage at 11....

  • Little know fact about Charles Stark Draper (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmandaHugginkiss ( 756492 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:01PM (#8389336)
    he is the great uncle of John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, the infamous phone hacker.

    I'm wondering if the Captain will get a prize someday.....

  • Alto PC (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stuffduff ( 681819 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:03PM (#8389344) Journal
    The Alto PC [grospixels.com] was such a huge leap forward that almost no one could really grasp the concept. These were the guys who saw the computer for the first time as something beyond punch cards, tape reels and stacks of line printed greenbar. They shaped the visions of people like Jobs & Woz, and helped to spark the personal computer revolution.

    Good Job! Well deserved!

    • Re:Alto PC (Score:2, Informative)

      by pkalkul ( 450979 )
      Except, of course, for the people that influenced the PARC researchers - such as JCR Licklider at the DARPA ("Man-Machine Symbiosis" was published in 1960), Douglas Englebart's Augmentation Research Center, and others.

      Great leap forwards make good copy, but rarely happen -- particularly in the history of technology.

  • Alan Kay and the rest of the PARC crew richly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:05PM (#8389380) Homepage
    deserve it.

    They brought computing to the masses (or would have if Xerox hadn't shot itself in the foot.)

    But Apple followed up with the Lisa, which cost too much, and then the Mac.

    Gates tagged along with Windows (which was stolen from IBM's Presentation Manager [which paid for its development.)

    The rest is history.

    Now if only they had thought or Relationships between Objects... (I have :-)

    • Nice try but Windows UI preceded the JOINTLY DEVELOPED IBM/Microsoft Presentation Manager UI (first shown in OS/2 1.1) which was a merger of Microsoft's Windows UI and IBM's Common User Access (CUA). CUA sought to make everything from PC GUIs to 3278 green-screen terminals look the same and just ended up with a least-common-denominator unusable UI.

    • Re:Alan Kay and the rest of the PARC crew richly (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > They brought computing to the masses (or would have if
      > Xerox hadn't shot itself in the foot.)
      >

      > But Apple followed up with the Lisa, which cost too much, and
      > then the Mac.

      Apple "followed up" with the Lisa and mac in the same way as I "follow up" by downloading music from the internet.

      In other words IP Theft. or IP violation. or whatever you want to gloss over it as. The only reason Xerox haven't sued it that PARC is primarily a research devision and hence so aren't involved in products

      • No, you idiot, the reasong XEROX didn't sue is that it never happened.

        Apple LICENSED the work that Xerox did. They gave the millions in Apple stock-- which was the biggest IPO ever at the time-- in exchange for work Xerox didn't know what to do with anyway. Xerox thought they were ripping Apple off.

        But this fact is conveniently forgotten by you anti-apple bigots.

        You're called on it-- LIAR.

        (And if you simply didn't know, then you shouldn't have made the accusation in the first place.)
    • Or, to put it simply for the historically challenged with some milestones added in for perspective:
      • 1972 - Xerox GUI/Smalltalk/Ethernet/Laser Printer
      • 1973
      • 1974
      • 1975 - Altair 8800 (not GUI)
      • 1976
      • 1977 - Apple ][ (not GUI)
      • 1978
      • 1979
      • 1980
      • 1981 - IBM PC - MS-DOS (not GUI)
      • 1982
      • 1983 - Apple Lisa
      • 1984 - Apple Macintosh
      • 1985 - Microsoft Windows
      • 1986
      • 1987 - IBM/Microsoft OS/2 (not GUI)
      • 1988 - IBM/Microsoft OS/2 Presentation Manager

      • The Alto was released in 1981, not 1972.

        And the Alto was released iwth the rudiments of a GUI, not a GUI.

        Do you even know what a GUI is? A GUI is an overlapping windows system with a desktop metaphor.

        Xerox invented the mouse, ethernet, smalltalk, etc. Not the GUI.

        It is simply dishonest to claim that a research effort is the same as a final product--- you deny credit to the people who took basic research and made it usable.
      • Back in the early 80's before the release of the Mac, Apple came out with a card & mouse for the Apple ][ and the software included a 16 color Paint application; which was definately GUI.

        Microsoft, on the other hand, started shipping it's versions of Windows overseas (Japan) well before it's domestic US appearance.

        • Nope. That would be a graphical app and not a Graphical User Interface which refers to the interface for the computer itself. There are lots of examples of graphical apps prior to the Macintosh.
          • Wait just a minute! If the app is running on a single user system which can only run one app at a time I'd say it comes dangerously close to being a GUI. But technically, hell; I guess I you're right!

            What if I go back and make a boot disk which only loads the app? All you can do is paint and reboot, then as an application specific system wouldn't a GUA also be a GUI?

      • Re:Alan Kay and the rest of the PARC crew richly (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Don't forget the Amiga, and GEOS for the 8 bitters...
      • Actually, even according to the stories told by the people who worked on the original Mac (at folklore.org -- lots of good reading even if you don't like Macs), Microsoft Windows was announced quite a long time before the Mac was released. Even in that early release, it clearly contained a lot of elements being planned for the Mac. The story is pretty funny, actually. Steve Jobs, in all of his High and Mighty Jobness, demanded that Bill Gates appear in his royal court. Gates showed up as requested, and Jobs

  • No mention of Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:13PM (#8389462) Homepage
    The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing.

    So, besides bias, is there a reason that these institutions were mentioned, but not Microsoft?

    "Charles P. Thacker also is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Corp."

    Geez...

  • Dealers of Lightning (Score:5, Informative)

    by tsangc ( 177574 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:18PM (#8389520)
    There's a really excellent book about PARC and the development of the Alto called Dealers of Lightning:

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/08 87 308910/103-7794804-1212634?v=glance

    I borrowed this book from my university library and really enjoyed reading about the development of Smalltalk, laser printers, an optical network link from two PARC buildings, Ethernet, and of course, the Alto.

    Highly recommended.

    • Re:Dealers of Lightning (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheAncientHacker ( 222131 ) <TheAncientHacker&hotmail,com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:33PM (#8389722)
      Great book. I've been lucky enough to know some of the people involved and this books is really accurate. (Well, by technology history book standards)
    • I just finished reading this book and agree with the recommendation. It tells the story of what happened at that remarkable facility over a period of about 10 years. It was certainly rather illuminating. A must, I think, for anybody interested in the history of computing.

      The odd thing for me was how advanced systems like the Alto were and that so many of the innovations it contained within took so long to come to market.

  • Sharing? (Score:3, Funny)

    by crawdaddy ( 344241 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:18PM (#8389527)
    The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people...

    Did they have to share because they...copied each other's work?

    ::rimshot::

    Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all day folks. Try the linux; it's really secure today.

  • Ethernet (Score:5, Informative)

    by dtio ( 134278 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:22PM (#8389568)
    For those from outer space the text 'the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers' refers to the development of the ethernet [wikipedia.org] network technology, no more no less.

    Other developments from PARC are the Graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer and the Smalltalk programming language.

    • Other developments from PARC are the Graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer and the Smalltalk programming language.

      The mouse, GUI and WYSIWYG came from inventions by Englebert's team at SRI, well before PARC did their improved implementations.

    • Ethernet was indeed the "networked" part of "the first practical networked personal computers". But the GUI and some of the other items you listed later are also vital parts of makes a computer a *personal* computer. So you're incorrect in saying that the text refers to "Ethernet, no more, no less". It refers to Ethernet, but also much more.

      Another point: PARC didn't originate the mouse. Douglas Engelbart invented that at SRI many years before, and the PARC GUI work builds on his ideas. Google for mou

  • See www.smalltalk.org (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rofthorax ( 722179 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:23PM (#8389583)
    Steve Jobs and Bill Gates borrowed
    their ides for the GUI and mouse and such from
    not only Xerox PARC but from the Smalltalk
    environment. Smalltalk is not just a language, its a Object Oriented operating environment.. Its hard to call it an operating system even though it controlled resources on the machine,
    and its not really just a language because it allows the users to change the workings of the language and the operating environment at any time.. Its just a massively self-referencing OO environment.. And everything we know of GUI's and mice and such today was based on smalltalk and the machine designed around it..

    Just Xerox was not smart enough to cash in on it because it was so far before its time that there were few with much power to exploit it and sell it.. PARC as was explained at the time was a campus full of nerds designing stuff that made sense without the constraints that usually hold down projects, like having to make money. They had enough money to develop this system.. But certainly nobody was foofing off.. Its hard to know exactly what was involved in the development, what led to it and if this can ever happen again..

    Get a big company with lots of money and poor resource management, get a lot of smart people who are driven to solve problems, keep the lawyers off campus.. Make sure the nerds are absolutely clueless about business and making money.. Remember at the time, nobody was making money selling software much.. The idea was to sell a machine.. Xerox sold hardware not software.. I don't think this can ever happen again.. There is just too much to take for granted, like that anyone can take the software and go sell a piece of it or release it on the Internet..

    • See www.squeak.org (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheAncientHacker ( 222131 ) <TheAncientHacker&hotmail,com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:36PM (#8389753)
      Alan Kay who invented Smalltalk-72 and a good deal of what we now call Object Oriented is currently doing a version of Smalltalk called Squeak. Or, as the website puts it, "Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change."
    • Except that Apple paid Xerox for a license, and Microsoft just stole it.

      Neither of these is "Borrowing".

      Furthermore, Apple advanced the state of the art a great deal.

      You guys really are bound and determined to ignore the work that Apple did when they INVENTED the windowing GUI.
    • Just Xerox was not smart enough to cash in on it

      Maybe it just had to be developed by another, new company, instead of one with a massive vested interest in paper documents. The way I understand it, a company that made a fortune in copying pieces of paper, enough to fund some real research, that research came up with a way to replace paper documents with computer screens - no wonder mgmt wanted to deep six it.

    • Jef Raskin wrote the following rebuttal to the same old disinformation when it appeared in the NYT and Macintouch [macintouch.com] [emphasis mine]:

      I contacted John Markoff when I saw the fine NYT article on the history of the Alto that has been discussed here by Lopez, Thain, and Horn. I've known Markoff for years, and he is one of the best and most knowledgeable writers about the personal computer era.

      My comment to Markoff was that his wording would lead a reader to conclude that Jobs got the inspiration for

  • Wasn't Lynn Conway involved in this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:25PM (#8389599)
    ...or was she still just a backroom player, still (re)working her way up the development ladder?

    For those that don't know about Lynn, she developed the first superscalar computer back in '61, the IBM ACS, and went on to develop much of the tech for VLSI. She spent much time at Parc during the '70's too, which is why I was wondering.

    There's something else very special about her as well, which endears her to me for similar reasons.

  • Congratulations to them! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OmniGeek ( 72743 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:29PM (#8389656)
    When I was a college student, I did a co-op assignment at Xerox in Webster, NY, where I had the chance to play with an Alto at lunchtimes. It was an impressive machine, the size of a dishwasher, with a strange mouse arrangement and a crisp, big monochrome bitmap display.

    I have fond memories of playing Mazewar (a VERY early real-time networked multi-player 3D VR game, one of the very first FPS games, I suspect) on the Alto in between system crashes.

  • Misleading attribution in original post (Score:5, Informative)

    by alispguru ( 72689 ) <bob,bane&me,com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:50PM (#8389899) Journal

    The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing.

    Please note that all the honorees (Kay, Lampson, Taylor, Thacker) did the work in question at PARC - not at MIT, not at HP, not at Microsoft (where two of them currently work).

    The "MIT and HP also making a showing" just shows the wisdom of those institutions for giving these guys a job after they've changed the world. It also shows typical Slashdot thinking - why mention HP and MIT, and leave Microsoft out, other than because Microsoft is Satan, even when they also hire the best and brightest after they've distinguished themselves elsewhere?
    • It also shows typical Slashdot thinking - why mention HP and MIT, and leave Microsoft out, other than because Microsoft is Satan, even when they also hire the best and brightest after they've distinguished themselves elsewhere?

      Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

      Or as applied to this article, I tried to summarise it according to where I thought they were working when they got the prize. I must have misread - I thought the people in question were actually at MIT an

  • Some real info about the Alto. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:53PM (#8389938) Homepage
    The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.

    The Alto's computer was a rack-mounted Data General minicomputer with some special microcode. Xexox built the mouse, Ethernet adapter, and CRT, but manufacture of the computer was outsourced.

    The real history of the GUI is that the first GUI appeared on the SAGE air defense system. The SAGE pointing device was a light gun. After light guns came light pens and the "RAND tablet", the first tablet input device. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in the late 1960s, and put together an impressive GUI demo, but he had to tie up an entire mainframe to make it work. The Alto was basically an attempt to squeeze down the technology into a useful size.

    Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.

    The Xerox PARC approach was to create technology that was futuristic but not cost effective, with the idea that progress in electronics would bring the cost down. That was exactly right.

    What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.

    That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.

    • The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.

      Man, you must be old. (sorry, all in good fun!)

      Doug did a lot of really important work, but it's not like what Kay and the other folks at PARC did was just to take Doug's work and fit it in a work station. A good many of the ideas that we see on our "modern" computers were invented at PARC and not by Doug.

      Alan still calls his Apple PowerBook his "interim dynabook." :) The computers we have today are

    • Re:Some real info about the Alto. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I was there. Started working on Star in 1979, (left Xerox in 1988). The Alto screen was the size of an 8 1/2 x 11" piece of paper oriented vertically (11" up, 8 1/2" side-to-side). Oh and the screens were monochrome. No color.

      Each of our machines had 2 drives with large removable disks. The disks were encased in hard plastic and were about 14" in diameter. Each drive held about 8Mb but my memory is fading (old age, you know!) The build room had a wall full of these disks.

      The box (including the drives) fit
    • The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.

      I wasn't there, but I don't think your facts are entirely correct.

      Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the p

  • Alan Kay and Squeak (Score:2, Informative)

    by mzimmerm ( 3100 )
    For Alan Kay's current work, look at www.squeak.org and www.opencroquet.org.

  • It's Kay (Score:3, Informative)

    by rixstep ( 611236 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @08:55PM (#8393092) Homepage
    Alan Kay did everything, and it's good he's recognised. He saw 'organisms'; he invented the term 'object orientation'; he worked with kids and LOGO, and saw this as becoming important for grownups as well. What did Alan Kay not invent or not help invent? Smalltalk everyone's heard of.

    And if they need any help financing his prize, maybe they can start a class action against Bjarne Stroustrup.

    I invented the term 'object-oriented' and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
    -- Alan Kay

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