How the PC Really Came to Be
A 1973 workstation inspired a generation of personal computers
Xerox is a name most often associated with office copiers. So it’s somewhat remarkable that Xerox developed the Alto, an advanced workstation that was the forerunner of the personal computer.
The Xerox Alto was the brainchild of a California research lab founded in 1970 known as Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The Computer Science Laboratory at PARC was initially managed by Robert Taylor, former director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, a federal agency, is widely credited with major computer science breakthroughs in the 1960s, including the internet. Through Taylor, PARC attracted other top research scientists from DARPA and elsewhere. The exceptional talent at PARC led to numerous innovations, many ahead of their time.
With the lofty goal of creating “The Office of the Future,” Xerox PARC’s team of information and physical sciences experts developed laser printing in 1971 and an object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk in 1972. That was just for starters.
The Emergence of Microcomputing
By the late 1960s, computers had evolved from mainframes to minicomputers. With the…
