Though never sold commercially, the Xerox Alto being developed and refined at Xerox PARC through the mid-1970s pioneered the graphical user interface, mouse control, and networked office computing—ideas that engineers from Apple and Microsoft would later adapt into machines that defined personal computing for the following four decades.
The Xerox Alto was, by any measure, decades ahead of its time, and its development throughout 1973 and 1974 at the Palo Alto Research Center quietly assembled nearly every element of the modern personal computer before almost anyone realized what was happening. Engineers Charles Thacker and Butler Lampson led a team building a machine with a bitmap display capable of showing actual fonts and graphics rather than crude text, controlled by a three-button mouse—radical concepts for an era when computers were still fed by punch cards.
The Alto also featured an early Ethernet connection, letting machines share files and printers on a local network, and ran what was essentially a WYSIWYG word processor, Bravo, that let users see formatted text on screen exactly as it would print—an idea utterly foreign to the computing mainstream of 1974.
Xerox never turned the Alto into a commercial product, a decision later regarded as one of the great missed opportunities in business history. But a visit by Apple engineers in 1979, famously including Steve Jobs, exposed them to the Alto's interface, and its DNA resurfaced in the Apple Lisa, the Macintosh, and eventually Microsoft Windows—an entire industry built on ideas Xerox itself failed to commercialize.
Key people: Butler Lampson, Charles Thacker