Xerox Alto - History

History

The Alto was conceived in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker. Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Clement Designlabs, whose team included Carl J. Clement, Ken Campbell (mechanical engineer), Terry West (industrial designer), and Fred Stengel. An initial run of 80 units was produced by Clement Designlabs, working with Doug Fairbairn at Xerox PARC, Tony Ciuffini and Rick Nevinger at Xerox El Segundo, who were responsible for installing the Alto’s electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2000 units over the next ten years.

Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and a running system is on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington. For his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, Charles P. Thacker was awarded the 2009 Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery on March 9, 2010. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto.

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