Comment by 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.
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).
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.