Xerox Alto (1973)

Released March 1973

The early days of personal computing including a lot of false starts. Ideas that should have propelled their progenitors to dominance often failed to hit the mark. One such company with great ideas but limited success was Xerox.

Still know today for its photocopiers and printers, Xerox decided decades ago that that future of the office was paperless. Because Xerox was very much wedded to paper, the idea of a paperless future would amount to nothing less than extinction. But throughout this part of its history, Xerox was torn between the forward-looking technologists and the backwards-looking pragmatists.

Somewhere out of this internal struggle, the Xerox Alto was born in 1973. It was the first computer system designed from the start to use a graphical user interface, inspired to a large degree by Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos five years previously. Xerox engineers realised that at some point computer systems would move beyond the realm of engineers in white coats to something that anyone could use, based in part around digitising everyday metaphors into skeuomorphic forms.*

Xerox Alto

The challenges of building a recognisably modern computer system in 1973 were immense. One major one was the lack of microprocessors – the Motorola 68000, Intel 8086, MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80 were still years away. Instead, Xerox engineers use four Texas Instruments 74181 ALUs  to do the hard work. Added to this was up to 512Kb of RAM and a 606 x 808 pixel monochrome display and a 3-button mouse. One of the most distinctive features was the large 12” portrait display that emulated a piece of paper, but less obvious at the time was the Alto’s Ethernet interface that allowed it to talk to other systems.

A lot of the Alto’s UI comprised of tables and text rather than icons and graphics. Still, it was good enough for preparing documents, drawing pictures, designing integrated circuits and playing games. These were all potentially useful things to do, but the Alto was fearsomely expensive – costing an equivalent of $125,000 in 2023 money.

The Alto was massively ahead of its time – it would take another decade or so for the technologies to start to become affordable. It also wasn’t a sales success, with only around 2000 units shipping, including those used by Xerox themselves.

Despite the small numbers built, the Alto was massively influential. The Apple Lisa and later the Macintosh were directly influenced by the work happening at Xerox, and more indirectly Windows and just about every other graphical user interface was too. For Xerox, the Alto was eventually succeeded by the Star in 1981, but this was only a limited success. Xerox itself was never fully wedded to the idea of the paperless office, and by the mid-1980s the pendulum was swinging back to the predictable markets of photocopies and printers.

Today the Alto exists in a few museums and private collections, it never was the sort of thing you could take home. Sadly the Alto and Star are largely forgotten, despite pioneering many of the technologies we take for granted today. Being first to market does not always means being successful, and that was certainly the case with Xerox...

* We apologise for the overuse of ancient Greek.

Image credits:
Michael Hicks via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0

Xerox Star 8010 (1981)

Introduced April 1981

By the early 1980s, hardware and software designers had great dreams about what they wanted products to be. Portable perhaps, affordable or business-oriented… but all of these were constrained by technology and price. But what if you dreamed big and without compromise, and built the best computer system you possibly could? This is what Xerox did.

The catchily-named Xerox 8010 Information System – more commonly known as the Xerox Star – introduced potential customers to the graphical user interface, mouse, Ethernet, servers and email. A great deal of modern computing technology was first available in the Star, but it certainly came at a price.

Xerox Star 8010

It had been a very long journey. Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos in 1968 had introduced many of these modern concepts, but running on primitive hardware. Many of Engelbart’s team migrated away to the giant Xerox corporation which had pioneered photocopiers and laser printers. The fortunes of Xerox were very much based in paper, but the concept of the paperless office loomed large and Xerox wanted to still be in business when paper was consigned to museums.

The Xerox Alto was their first attempt, launched in 1973 it incorporated a GUI (graphical user interface) and a mouse, but it was never sold commercially. Instead the Alto was deployed around the Xerox PARC as well as some universities and research organisations. It took another eight years for Xerox to realise a commercial product – the 8010 – but even though it had taken over a decade since Engelbart had shown the concepts, the Star was still way ahead of everyone else.

Strictly speaking, “Star” referred to the software rather than the hardware. And this wasn’t simply a computer you could buy and take home. Doing anything required a network, some servers and perhaps $100,000 in 1981 money for a small installation (about $250,000 today).

Japanese market Fuji Xerox 8012-J

The price like the name was astronomical. But what that substantial wedge of cash bought you was a computer system with a high-resolution 17” monitor, a carefully thought out software interface that could work collaboratively with others, based on the high-end AMD Am2900 CPU. And the software was like nothing else.

Everything was WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) – you could edit two pages of a document side by side, including charts and tables from other applications and when they printed out they matched what was on the screen. You’d expect that today, but in 1981 it was revolutionary. The clever object-oriented operating system delivered features to the desktop that wouldn’t be common until a decade later.

There’s a problem with trying to sell customers a product that they don’t know they want at a price they can’t afford... all the efforts of Xerox to create an advanced computer system did not translate into many sales. Xerox tried to reposition the 8010 into a desktop publishing platform called the 6085 (aka Daybreak) which included a laser printer, and although this was a capable system it was still expensive and sales were slow. Later attempts to port the software to OS/2 and other platforms also failed. Xerox weren’t done with WYSIWYG though, a spin-off created the iconic Ventura Publisher, but that was only a passing success.

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Xerox Star UI

Despite being a sales failure, the Star was a technological success. In particular elements from the Star user interface found their way into the Macintosh, Windows and a host of other platforms. The networked environment too was increasingly emulated by competitors. As is sometimes the case with big, sprawling companies the Xerox Corporation itself did not seem to understand or be able to protect its own intellectual property. As with many pioneers, it was other adapting their idea that made it a success. Today elements of the Star user interface are pretty much everywhere, but this pioneering system is long dead.

Image credits:
Rhys Jones via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Fuji Xerox - Courtesy of FUJIFILM Business Innovation Corp
Amber Case / Digibarn via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0

Xerox 914 (1959)

Xerox 914 plus contemporary advertising

Launched September 1959

Pretty much ever since human beings invented paper, they’ve wanted an easy way to copy what was written, printed or drawn on that paper. One Wednesday in September 1958 – about 2000 years after paper was invented – there was finally a solution.

The Xerox 914 was the fruit of a two-decade development of a dry copy processes called xerography, a technology that had been acquired by the Haloid Company of New York. Able to copy full-sized documents onto plain paper, the 914 was a significant technological advance over the slower, messier methods that had gone before.

Weighing nearly 300 kilograms and with a large footprint as well, the 914 was pretty big but still quite usable as a departmental copier. With an ability to copy 100,000 pages per month at 7 sheets per minute, the 914 is still pretty competitive by modern standards.

If you wanted to buy one it was phenomenally expensive at $27,500 (roughly equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars today) or apparently you could rent one for just $95 a month plus a charge for each copy made.

It has its problems though, notably paper jams could result in a small fire which later models of 914 dealt with by including a small fire extinguishers euphemistically called a “scorch guard”.  Despite this the Xerox 914 was a huge success, shipping 200,000 units until the end of production in 1976. Haloid even changed its name to Xerox after its best-known line of products.

A behemoth such as the Xerox 914 is hardly a collectable item, and given that probably most of them were rented you are probably unlikely to stumble across one. But perhaps there are still a few gathering dust in basements and store rooms…

Image credit: Xerox

Xerox 9700 (1977)

Launched 1977

Forty years ago we were seeing the start of a boom in personal computing.. but at the other end of the scale we were also seeing the dawn of digital imaging, in this case with laser printers.

The Xerox 9700 was launched in 1977, and although it lagged behind the IBM 3800, the Xerox was much closer to today's office laser printers than the IBM which was basically a very fast line printer. Capable of a maximum throughput of 120 pages per minute on cut sheet paper at up to 300 dpi, the Xerox 9700 could combine text and graphics in ways that hadn't previously been possible.

It was a big beast, which was understandable when you realise that it was basically three things joined together. Xerox took the guts of one of their own photocopiers and added a unit containing the laser and imaging system to it. Then they bolted a DEC PDP 11/34 to the whole thing to act as a controller. Sharp eyed readers may notice that in the picture the PDP 11 is being controlled by a Lear-Siegler ADM-3A.

Xerox 9700

It was huge and hardly cheap. Even in 1980 after it had been around for a while, the Xerox 9700 still started at $35,240 (worth about $100,000 today). It took about another decade for laser printers to hit the mass market with devices such as the Apple LaserWriter or HP LaserJet range.
Forty years later, Xerox still make printers including huge devices such as the Xerox Nuvera range which cost almost as much the 9700 did back in the day.

Image credits: Xerox via Digibarn