History
The Alto was conceived in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker. Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Clement Designlabs, whose team included Carl J. Clement, Ken Campbell (mechanical engineer), Terry West (industrial designer), and Fred Stengel. An initial run of 80 units was produced by Clement Designlabs, working with Doug Fairbairn at Xerox PARC, Tony Ciuffini and Rick Nevinger at Xerox El Segundo, who were responsible for installing the Alto’s electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.
Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and a running system is on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington. For his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, Charles P. Thacker was awarded the 2009 Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery on March 9, 2010. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto.
Read more about this topic: Xerox Alto
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)