XEROX - the computer giant that never was

[botanika]

Almost everything we take for granted in computing today was invented or fostered by Xerox. I remember drooling at a Microbee my dad bought home in the 80's that could make a christmas tree out of symbols from basic commands...now Ive got computer chipped appliances and gadgets all over the house. Almost all computers nowdays use Intel chips. In the late 70's/early 80's the microprocessor, if there even was one, were supplied by Intel, MOS, Zilog, RCA, or any number of other companies. Memory was static, dynamic, and shift-register. And without the Internet, programs were loaded from paper tape, punched cards, cassette tape, floppy disks, cartridge, or even manually switched in by hand.

Back in the 1980s, you wouldn't recognize the internet. There was no Microsoft Windows that was internet ready. What you had was unix login, with Archie and Gopher resources from many wide open university databases, research institutions, and access to the JPL Cray network with a shell account. Most universities and a little known company, Xerox, started it with the help of the US government. Arpnet became a UNIX based text system. Archie was used as a web crawler to find interconnected resources and directories, and Gopher, to go fetch the files. Gopher was similar to HTML, and Archie was more the search engine.

As early as 1978 Xerox pulled together 100 of the nations top computer scientists into a think tank and posed the question "What is the future of computing?" to PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). And PARC answered with the the Xerox Model 100. A 2 1/2 foot tall brown droid looking box complete with ethernet card, floppy contoller card, and ram card - each about as big as a full size ATX motherboard today. A LASER mouse, YES!, and a 20" high resolution, high contrast black and white monitor. On boot, you had a desktop with a trashcan. When you mounted an application disk, the old 8" floppy drive, the application icons would present themself on the desktop. Documents could be stored to a network drive, or floppy, and it looked kinda like a MAC.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

‘It all began in 1971 in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco, when Xerox, the copier company, set up the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. The Xerox management had a sinking feeling that if people started reading computer screens instead of paper, Xerox was in trouble. Unless...they could dominate the paperless office of the future.’

Those early PARC researchers were truly inventing the future.

Bob Metcalfe

‘We're going to build these personal computers - we're going to put one on every desk. Now in 1996 one on every desk doesn't sound that amazing does it...but in 1971/2 you were lucky to have a computer in your city let alone your building and if it was in your building there'd be one and we were talking about putting them on every desk and this required a new kind of network.’

Larry Tesler

‘Everybody wanted to make a real difference, we really thought that we were changing the world and that at the end of this project or this set of projects personal computing would burst on the scene exactly the way we had envisioned it and take everybody by total surprise.

But the brilliant researchers at PARC could never persuade the Xerox management that their vision was accurate. Head Office in New York ignored the revolutionary technologies they owned three thousand miles away. They just didn't get it.’

Steve Jobs had co-founded Apple Computer in 1976. The first popular personal computer, the Apple 2, was a hit - and made Steve Jobs one of the biggest names of a brand-new industry. At the height of Apple's early success in December 1979, Jobs, then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox Parc.

Steve Jobs

‘And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.

Bill Gates

'Even before we finished our work on the IBM PC, Steve Jobs came and talked about what he wanted to do what he thought he could do sort of a LISA but cheaper. We said boy we'd love to help out. The LISA had all its own applications but of course they required a lot of memory ah and we thought we could do better and so Steve signed a deal with us to actually provide bundled applications for the first Mac and so we were big believers in the Mac and what Steve was doing there.'

It was a turning-point. Jobs decided that this was the way forward for Apple.’

Steve Jobs

‘Basically they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been you know a company ten times its size. Could have been the IBM of the nineties… could have been the Microsoft of the nineties.’

Windows, the Mac OS, all were inspired by Xerox' office of the future. They had a networked system of work stations with a mouse and graphic user interface way back around 1980! This was when DOS was pretty much a dream and people still talked of FORTRAN and cryptic stuff like that.

It is funny and sad that Xerox completely dropped the ball with both the GUI and desktop computer and with the laser printer. It was 100% poor marketing thanks to their management and marketing group. Both embraced the 'centralized' copying (big 9000 series copiers in one location for all copying - major inconvenience for the working folk) and the mega buck terminal / main frame computing setup which was too much per copy for most businesses. The advent of the PC by IBM spelled the death of the Xerox mega-buck system, even though it (the Xerox system) was far superior. Big networks of computers being used as little more then terminals with a main file server are now the norm. Xerox had it back around 1980. Xerox would probably be as big as Apple today if it was not for confused management

'Although the work at Xerox PARC was crucial, it was not the spark that took PCs out of the hands of experts and into the popular imagination. That happened inauspiciously in January 1975, when the magazine Popular Electronics put a new kit for hobbyists, called the Altair, on its cover, for the first time, anybody with $400 and a soldering iron could buy and assemble his own computer. The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs to build the first Apple computer, and a young college dropout named Bill Gates to write software for it. Meanwhile, the person who deserves the credit for inventing the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the industry he had spawned to go to medical school. Now he is a doctor in small town in central Georgia.'

"The kind of computing that people are trying to do today is just what we made at PARC in the early 1970s," says Alan Kay, a former Xerox researcher who jumped to Apple in the early 1980s.

Xerox eventually tried to capitalize on the technologies with the Xerox Star, released commercially in 1981, but the system was expensive and sold poorly.

An age before the World of Warcraft:

http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Most important PC’s in history:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/25_most_important_pcs_history

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Edited August 5, 2011 by botanika

[FancyPants]

I bet the (mis)management dudes are Xerox got handed their asses when IBM hit the markets.

[mescalito]

Interesting read thanks botanika!

My mum used to work for N.C.R. installing and manually programming computers(with switches i.e. binary) and I can remember getting my first P.C, the old C-64 when it first came out..

My mum was blown away that it had pretty much the same computing power as the machines they used to install which took up the whole basement floorspace of the city block buildings they were put into.