Xerox Alto and Parc Labs

Truly, Before its Time...

A venerable copy machine company was noticing the stellar rate of growth in the sector known today as "Information Technology". And the use of this new technology in the office posed a serious risk to that company's dominance as a leader, if people didn't buy paper anymore, they wouldn't buy copy machines. to mitigate this threat the company decided to create a laboratory to investigate the opportunity of making their own information or office technology as a safeguard. Xerox called their lab, Parc. Xerox didn't bother to adopt much of the technology that Parc came up with, 40 years ago predated the computer industry, they were more or less happy to give away all their creations. while the copy machine company didn't profit from their designs, you however, did. the little lab invented; email, Ethernet, object oriented programming, laser pointing, graphical user interface, the first computer to use a mouse, and the ability for a computer to display bitmapped graphics. this is, more or less everything that a computer is today, the source code for modern technocracy, all created by a paper company but never successfully commercialized.

Xerox, had they gone to market with their creations would have been an unbeatable giant in the industry. their first computer, the Alto was created in 1973, 11 years earlier than the Macintosh...

Alto.

Imagine ipads and tablets and the Internet as being eleven years older than they are today. a heap of iphone 6's being in your junk drawer, a relic long forgotten.  One might ask, why the heck didnt they?

They tried, mostly, just not very hard... the Alto was priced at $50,000 for your first machine and $16,000 for subsequent ones (the alto was designed to work in a server-client configuration). they might as well have just said "eleventy zillion dollars". if you adjust the 1973 dollars for inflation, the computers would have been worth way way more than the people operating them, you might not buy a Macbook either if if was more than a German car. Xerox also made a machine for their customers, Businesses, not the public at large. Xerox felt that business would fuel the demand for this sort of machine and people would have no desire to purchase their own gigantic computer. lastly, in one ill fated move Xerox decided to showcase the Alto to a small startup company after years of not selling them. Steven Jobs and his coworkers were impressed by how well the graphical user interface worked...and the rest, is history.

Parc labs was on the precipice of what is now a critical understanding of people’s relationship with information technology; in order to interact with technology, technology needs to be relateable in human terms. “C:/” usually fails to “prompt” the imagination. Usually technology is a long, gradual, linear development over time. Trying to understand who “invented” the computer is limited to by the phrase; “ but just a few years before this happened, someone else had developed something very similar...”. History shows however, that there are a few remarkable explosions of brilliance. and Parc Labs was one of the brightest.

You may be asking yourself: “why did I just watch a video of an empty light industrial building”. This is a totally valid question, and it is worthy of a baffling response,

(Especially baffling in the digital age). ---Historical Context, or historical perspective.

How does footage of a factory being shut down offer this context? Only with feeling, it’s a gentile guide leading you to a time in computing long forgotten and often mocked, the beginning…

Even the beginning, can be contested. Apostles of Steve Jobs might say that logic began with the Apple 1 in 1976, however the idea seems to go back a littler earlier, about two thousand years earlier. Clearly, some consensus is required on the idea of “computer”. For the sake of narrowing the ideological scope, I will reify the “computer” and define it as a personal programmable electronic logic general purpose machine. The Apple 1 meets this criterion, the Antikythera mechanism does not. The definition can be clarified further, about two hundred Apple one’s were sold, and sold as a circut board that hobbyists could fuddle with. It didn’t actually do anything useful, no taxes, no games… no fun. It was about as useful to Joanne Shmo as a two thousand year old eclipse predictor. No, the first “computer” needed to do something useful or interesting, and this would need to be evidenced by people actually purchasing and owning it.

So then what was it? The Apple 2 in 1977, the popular and affordable Tandy Trs-80 in 1977, the IBM Personal Computer in 1981? All those machines may have brought the idea of computer into a common understanding or misunderstanding, but they were beloved only by hobbyists and tinkers, and were owned by few. What about this little guy? It was useful, less threatening than its competitors, nice to look at, colour!!, half the price of anything else, had lots of cool games, downright fun to use, and… was wildly popular. It was a “computer” that warranted owning, any it outsold its competitors by many magnitudes. The Commodore 64, was our first “computer”. If you are a compu-historian you might have even remembered laughing at it as you tinkered with your “real” computer, an apple 2 or IBM. There is a good chance you haven’t heard of it, just like that factory, it is ancient pointless history.

            This brings me to the point I have been trying to make, in the digital era history is irrelevant. The only matters of importance are the matters immediate. The written word brought things into permanance, the computer made those things temporary, and the internet made every slice of data and idea purely transitory, a thing that exists for a while until something new exists in its place. How long lived are internet memes? Not very… The complicated element in this is; we begin to think of what is current, as what is first, or primary. Occasionally a friend tells me “Steve Jobs invented the smartphone” or “The iPhone was the first handheld computer”. For those individuals, those statements are completely true, as for that person, the smartphone didn’t exist until they purchased one. But… It may be beneficial to think of technology as a scale of development, even if we conclude that the C64 was the first personal computer, we must first ignore all the development that preceded it.

And

            Thinking historically is a slow, romantic, infinitely interesting canoe trip though the human experience. It may seem trite to discuss the C64, or the Atari, or the Amiga, but is it any less ridiculous then thinking the iPhone 5 or Android 4.2 phone will change your life?