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Comment by TomMasz

2 months ago

The Alto is another example of what Xerox could have been had it not been so wedded to putting dots on paper. In my twenty years at Xerox I watched it slowly (and then quickly) shrink as the dots on paper market shrank.

In an alternative universe, Xerox is mentioned in the same breath as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

9 comments

TomMasz

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flyinghamster  2 months ago

I always thought it was crazy that Xerox had all this ahead-of-the-time technology in its labs, yet when it released a commercial PC, what we got was the 820, a me-too CP/M system that came out just in time for the IBM PC to steamroll it.

  • WillAdams  2 months ago

    Contrast the price of that machine, against what the Alto's successor the Star was costing (my wife's aunt-by-marriage oversaw the first Alto installation at the U.S. government in DC and even the Feds couldn't justify the cost to move from the Alto to Star).

  • pjmlp  2 months ago

    Exactly for having such systems, after Speccy, my group was split between a few folks getting Amigas, using MS-DOS 3.3 on school labs on PC1512, and a couple of years later getting hold of 386 with help of my parents, that I don't appreciate the TUI revival.

    We used to dream of better systems, the Xerox dream.

AdmiralAsshat  2 months ago

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

  • turnsout  2 months ago

    Again, this was a business deal. Xerox was allowed to purchase $1M of pre-IPO Apple stock in exchange for the visit. No one was tricked, nothing was stolen, and everyone knew what the deal was.

  • reaperducer  2 months ago

    It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

    Only on HN is $1,000,000 in stock considered "free."