Did you know that... #001

Did you know that in 1973 Chuck Thacker, Alan Kay and other engineers at Xerox PARC used an image of Cookie Monster, the popular character from the wonderful educational entertainment for kids Sesame Street, as the first program of one of the earliest personal computers ever that was called Alto. The computer was small enough to fit under a common desk. Two years later they released a mail-order computer kit called Altair 8800one which did inspire a geek to be named Bill Gates, and the rest is history...
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) history is worth to be read as this top level institute is well known for being at the same time one of the biggest success and failure of the private company which founded and paid the bills for several years. From PARC developed several milestones in the history of the computer which have a fundamental impact on the information technology we know today. Some of them are:
* Computer generated bitmap graphics
* Graphical user interface featuring windows and icons
* WYSIWYG text editor
* InterPress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript)
* Ethernet local area computer network
* Fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment
Several of the developments the likes of the above listed where included in the Alto computer.

Unfortunately Xerox was at the time a very conservative company and wasn't interested in exploiting the wonders its own research center produced. Apart from printer innovations, like the development of the laser printer, all other PARC develops became prey of others who were much more keen to them. It's maybe worth remembering Apple visited the PARC and got enticed by the PARC GUI onto which the first commercially successful Macintosh GUI was based (at least as a conceptual idea).
If you're a super geek you may want to check Altogether, is a microcode-level simulator for the Xerox Alto personal workstation (by Eric Smith).






The Cookie Monster image of Sesame Workshop and it's here reproduced under the terms of the Fair Use. I will comply with remove the image if requested by the owner. I don't currently know the owner of the Alto picture and I will comply with naming the owner or remove the image if requested by the owner.