On 12/22/99, Alan Mead (as "[EMAIL PROTECTED]") wrote:
>Thanks for all the replies. My notes are at home, from memory here are the
>seemingly reliable bits:
>
>The STAR by the Xerox PARC folks was the first commercial system using the
>mouse and other UI innovations but it has an enormous cost ($16000 was
>quoted) and was never a hit. I believe they also created a computer called
>Alto. By all accounts Xerox was unable to understand this market and never
>made much money. I think they concluded that PARC was an experiment that
>had run it's course without much fruition; they turned their back on
>computers and closed PARC.
Er, uh-um. Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Reseach Center) is still open. A
co-worker came from there and reports its as out-of-contral as ever. Though
of course with no Alan Kay or Adele Foster, but their website touts the
1st blue laser for printing and research into process flow. One item not
touted was the first mailing-list, John Brodie's "SF-LOVERS" in 1979 -
a creation we listees are all thankful for ;>
And the ALTO, which later begat the commercial failure STAR, was the more
interesting computing system. Of course lab systems usually are, just like
it took APPLE years to unlobotomize the MAC to return to its LISA origins.
Its interesting how the basic discoveries made at SRI by researchers like
Englebart and others were exploited to create systems at PARC, though it
took geek toy makers like APPLE to bring them to us.
check out PARC: www.parc.xerox.com
see a photo of the 1st mouse (w/ some additional history) at:
www.csl.sri.com/history/augment.shtml
- michael, san jose, ca
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