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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

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Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#31

Post by Animats »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17
dalke wrote: post #9

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh sys…

I agree that its a great story. Like all good stories it tries to distill the point from a much more complex and nuanced world. And because the world is more complicated than narrative fiction, there are always other aspects that contribute or can be portrayed in different ways. The reality of things as I came to understand them were these; Jef Raskin was passionate about user interface design like few people I have…

Jef Raskin was passionate about user interface design, but had a completely different approach. The realization of Raskin's thinking is the Canon Cat.[1] Video demo: [2] It's a machine for text editing with the minimal number of keystrokes. There are special "Leap" keys, and a "Front" shift for extra characters on keytop fronts. There's no pointing device.

It's an elegant concept, but nothing one would think of as a GUI today. It's more like something that would appeal to Markdown enthusiasts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#32

Post by dalke »

kens wrote: post #13
dalke wrote: post #9

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh sys…

Chapter 23 of "Dealers of Lightning" points out that everyone describes the Steve Jobs visit(s) in contradictory ways. "No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. PARC engineers disagree about who delivered what portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado..." I recommend "Dealers of Light…

I'm more interested in what was going on before the visit, because the myth is that Jobs was like Prometheus. To counter that myth, we must look into what people knew earlier. Quoting from the Standford link I mentioned before, at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html :

> Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the 1979 visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh (a collection of essays, technical specs, and brainstorms written by Jef Raskin on and others) dating from the fall of 1979-- months before the PARC visit-- show that the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device

It also comments that the myth "assumes that Xerox PARC's ideas weren't well-known before Apple engineers saw them, or had even been actively kept hidden from public view." I see echos of that in your own comment that Smalltalk was a secret. As that Stanford link points out "Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there."

I think you have misremembered the part about Smalltalk and overlapping windows being a secret? Ingalls wrote "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" for POPL '78, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages (doi:10.1145/512760.512762). It shows overlapping windows for figures 1-3, where figure 1 is "A typical Smalltalk display." It also has "if the stylus is depressed within the window, the content is redisplayed, thus showing it “in front of” the other windows", which is a description of how overlapping windows works.

As some additional background, you mentioned "forced by management to show Steve Jobs all the secret stuff". This is because, and quoting again from that Stanford link, "Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."

A lab, by the way, which received thousands of visitors each year.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#33

Post by kristopolous »

kens wrote: post #30
Arjuna wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminded me of this interview [1] with Steve Jobs: "And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was Object Oriented Programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all netw…

>Now remember, it was very flawed; what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time. I find it amusing how Steve Jobs crams three negs into one sentence.

Not only, but it's a very Aristotelian perspective on human interaction. I'd caution not to cheat rich analysis through binary thinking, but then again, I'm not the billionaire here...

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#35

Post by dalke »

kps wrote: post #14
dalke wrote: post #9

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh sys…

> the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. There is a big difference between having a bitmapped screen and graphical input on one hand, and having a Starlike WIMP user interface on the other. This sounds like it was written by someone who has never seen anything else.

I think you have drawn an incorrect inference from that text.

Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project at Apple, was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year. He and others in the AI lab "were tightly intermixed with the people at PARC" (Quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interview... ).

I believe he knew what a Starlike WIMP user interface entailed.

He also "explained the details and rationale of the work at PARC to Atkinson, Jobs and others. PARCs philosophy was therefore well known at Apple [before Jobs' famous visit]". - http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht... .

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#36

Post by dalke »

mayank10j wrote: post #12
dalke wrote: post #9

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh sys…

This doesn't mean Macintosh wasn't inspired by Xerox , even if they started work with Macintosh and Lisa there's is big chance getting first hand look at Xerox they have changed their approach drastically. Even if Android was in development before iphone debute they got drastic inspiration from iphone UI.

I didn't say otherwise. It's absolutely clear that ideas in Macintosh were inspired by PARC, just like ideas at PARC were inspired by SRI.

My complaint is about the assertion that "[Jobs] was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox's ideas", when the inspiration came before that visit, and was not due to Jobs.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#37

Post by kens »

Animats wrote: post #34

They'll have to find or build a 3Mb/s Ethernet anyway. Ask around; maybe someone still has a 3Mb/s to 10Mb/s gateway. If they can get to 10Mb on coax, they can get an off the shelf box to go to 10baseT and to the modern world.

The Living Computer Museum is working on a 3Mb/s Ethernet gateway. I'm also looking into making one with a BeagleBone (which is why I've been looking at its PRU microcontrollers lately).

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#38

Post by dmd »

KC8ZKF wrote: post #4
vcarl wrote: post #2

I love these posts. I don't properly understand the majority of what's being done, but a step by step of somebody solving a difficult problem in a space I know nothing about is so fascinating.

This series, assembled and fleshed out, would make a fine book.

Or a great web site!

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#39

Post by dalke »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #24
dalke wrote: post #9

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh sys…

You should browse around folklore.org and look at the posts about the early Macintosh: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... The Lisa and Macintosh projects interfaces pre-Xerox visit were remarkably different from post-visit. The Macintosh pre-early-1980-Xerox-visit was based around soft keys. Yes it had a bitmapped graphical display, but it was not a mouse based user interface as we know i…

I have read through folklore.org but I never noticed that change in UI from 1979 to 1980. Thank you for pointing that out.

Now that I am paying attention to that, I see in Jan. 1980 Raskin wrote "A lightpen for graphic input is being considered" for the Macintosh. http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/... .

In the link you pointed to shows that by summer of '80 there was no longer support for softkeys and there was support for a mouse. The primary documents at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html only start talking about a Macintosh mouse in spring of '80.

This fits well with a transition from Canon Cat UI to a PARC-derived UI, as you've described.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#40

Post by fzzzy »

dalke wrote: post #35
kps wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. There is a big difference between having a bitmapped screen and graphical input on one hand, and having a Starlike WIMP user interface on the other. This sounds like it was written by someone who has never seen anything else.

I think you have drawn an incorrect inference from that text. Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project at Apple, was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year. He and others in the AI lab "were tightly intermixed with the people at PARC" (Quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interview... ). I believe he knew what a Starlike WIMP user interface entailed. He also "explained the details and rat…

I don't think Raskin liked WIMP very much. You can see what his original vision for the Macintosh was in the Canon Cat, which he went on to develop after leaving apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

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