Mind-blowing to see someone using an Alto and a tablet at the same time. You almost can't tell the tablet is a distant descendant of the Alto, it's like it's from another planet.
The Alto was meant as an interim Dynabook. That is a stopgap to test ideas on until they could do the real thing. The tablet as it is today, no matter the make, has almost nothing in common with the original ideas of the Dynabook. Apps for instance are as anathema to the service idea as you could probably get and you don't want to carry your pad with you while carrying two grocery bags as was the original requirement.
I disagree very much, the ideas at the foundation are the same and to me it's clear and obvious that the tablet is indeed a direct descendant of what they tried as a first iteration with the Alto, which is a more human and natural way to interact with a computer. As for carrying a tablet and shopping or a tablet and a bunch of other stuff in your hands at the same time, I do it all the time with my iPad. Granted it has cracked glass and scuffed edges after 4 years of use several hours a day 364 days a year, but I'm typing this to you on the very iPad I'm talking of. In contrast you should look at what other computers of the time were like and for most people until when the mac came, they share nothing in terms of how you interact with it, with a tablet. Also the mac was a continuation of the Alto's important idea, and they tried with the newton and so did Palm and others. I had a palm 3 which I carried with me and used extensively for quite a long time until being online started to be a sort of requirement for most of the things I wanted to do. Then I switched to a Nokia communicator which I really hated the keyboard on, and then to the first Ericsson touch screen-ish phones etc. I tried the early iterations of tablets and such but the pen was never a natural thing and the software and speed was simply not there. With the iPad coming out, as soon as I could, I picked one up and have almost no use of my smartphones ever since, other than as an actual phone to call people on.
There is something special about the Alto's display resolution because we would see the same resolution of 72 pixels per inch used later on other Xerox graphics products and on the Macintosh. Even most Windows graphics sofware defaulted to drawing to the display at 72 pixels per inch.
This reminds me somewhat of the old Athena/xlib widgets (holding the middle button at the right place to scroll, right click to paste, etc.). It's of course hard to tell just from watching. [a still popular program which uses xlib is the xterm. It has a lot of hidden mouse-chording in it, like holding the Ctrl key and middle mouse button to show a menu]
Yes, Josh Dersch from the LCM wrote an excellent emulator. Ken used it extensively in this restoration to reverse engineer how the microcode should works. It is called Contralto. Available here: www.livingcomputers.org/Discover/News/ContrAlto-A-Xerox-Alto-Emulator.aspx
SkuldChan42 SALTO doesn't work very well and ContrAlto doesn't have a Windows EXE last I knew, nor support for me to use my own disks. I rather like the vertical display, but it's very difficult to find a vertically oriented CRT that's compatible with a more modern computer these days.
Fantastic series, I especially like the info on the Diablo, filing that knowledge away for when I get to servicing my own Diablo 31's. What I don't get is why it appears you gave up so easily on repairing the mouse top bearing. Tiny ballraces are readily available, I even have some around that size in my parts stash. Measure the OD, ID and width with a digital capiler or micrometer and obtain one, and if housing disassmbly is destructive then you could get a watchmaker or someone with a watchmaker's lathe to turn up a replacement shaft if necessary. For such a valuable item it's worth really trying all approaches. By the way, do you have the chorded keyset for this machine?
Thanks Carl. If you do get hold of one would you be able to take some measurements of it? It's been a dream of mine to draw up a CAD drawing of one, and make a working replica, original in appearance, to use with a modern PC someday.
This is why it's also important to "take the class" on a software product, haha... Was the cursor referred to as the "Caret' in X-Bravo like ViewPoint/(GVWIN)? I remember in ViewPoint that you could click the mouse once at the beginning of a sentence and a character would be highlighted. Click again and a single word would be highlighted. Click again and the whole sentence would be highlighted.
I took a picture of one of the Altos out in the wild that were donated to various places by Alan Kay. This one was in an office area behind a window in the technology wing at the Boston Museum of Science back in June of 2011. pbs.twimg.com/media/CyOIHe4XAAAzv3g.jpg:orig I figured I'd comment this into the next Alto video you put up, but it seems that happened 5 days ago as of this post and I somehow didn't get notified about it! thanks youtube. I don't know if the Alto is still publicly viewable or if it's been archived. I know I happened to find it by accident peeping through the window. I'm hoping the emulator gets more love soon.
It would be awesome if there was a way to digitize the video signal coming out of the Alto so that it could be preserved exactly rather than only through video. In theory, running it through an emulator will look about the same, but capturing the actual video signal would be more authentic.
douro20 You could digitize it with any modern digital oscilloscope that has long enough memory to store a complete frame of analog video signal (the video channel, i.e. luminance). And here “modern” extends back into the 90s at least. A LeCroy with 64MB of waveform memory will easily capture an entire frame with many samples per pixel. 8 bits is more than enough resolution for the monochrome (or is it grayscale?) video signal. Some German fellow whose name I forget got a fast reverse engineered connection to those abundant LeCroy digitizer boards (they are the heart of the 9xxx series of scopes, IIRC). You could also reduce the vertical resolution and dump it to a bunch of floppies (can be emulated) :) Or to a SCSI hard drive emulator. Not hard at all. And truly modern scopes with fast network connection can probably dump the video in real time over LXI. Just remember that a 10baseT Ethernet connection has more bandwidth than the video signal in this thing (assuming it’s monochrome).
Staggering how Xerox was hoarding the future for almost a decade before anyone cared to notice. really Incredible stuff.
Mind-blowing to see someone using an Alto and a tablet at the same time. You almost can't tell the tablet is a distant descendant of the Alto, it's like it's from another planet.
The Alto was meant as an interim Dynabook. That is a stopgap to test ideas on until they could do the real thing.
The tablet as it is today, no matter the make, has almost nothing in common with the original ideas of the Dynabook.
Apps for instance are as anathema to the service idea as you could probably get and you don't want to carry your pad with you while carrying two grocery bags as was the original requirement.
I disagree very much, the ideas at the foundation are the same and to me it's clear and obvious that the tablet is indeed a direct descendant of what they tried as a first iteration with the Alto, which is a more human and natural way to interact with a computer.
As for carrying a tablet and shopping or a tablet and a bunch of other stuff in your hands at the same time, I do it all the time with my iPad. Granted it has cracked glass and scuffed edges after 4 years of use several hours a day 364 days a year, but I'm typing this to you on the very iPad I'm talking of.
In contrast you should look at what other computers of the time were like and for most people until when the mac came, they share nothing in terms of how you interact with it, with a tablet.
Also the mac was a continuation of the Alto's important idea, and they tried with the newton and so did Palm and others. I had a palm 3 which I carried with me and used extensively for quite a long time until being online started to be a sort of requirement for most of the things I wanted to do. Then I switched to a Nokia communicator which I really hated the keyboard on, and then to the first Ericsson touch screen-ish phones etc. I tried the early iterations of tablets and such but the pen was never a natural thing and the software and speed was simply not there. With the iPad coming out, as soon as I could, I picked one up and have almost no use of my smartphones ever since, other than as an actual phone to call people on.
There is something special about the Alto's display resolution because we would see the same resolution of 72 pixels per inch used later on other Xerox graphics products and on the Macintosh. Even most Windows graphics sofware defaulted to drawing to the display at 72 pixels per inch.
Don't stop!! Loving this series, thanks for sharing guys - it's great to watch you having fun with this piece of history you've resurrected
amazing features in the mouse and the Draw editor... I really am impressed
This reminds me somewhat of the old Athena/xlib widgets (holding the middle button at the right place to scroll, right click to paste, etc.). It's of course hard to tell just from watching.
[a still popular program which uses xlib is the xterm. It has a lot of hidden mouse-chording in it, like holding the Ctrl key and middle mouse button to show a menu]
amazing how aldus/claris/adobe didn't even manage to catch up on their draw programs until maybe the nineties
Fantastic!
Thank you for sharing.
Yeah, back to mechanics.Btw.: the mouse will outlive our universe.
There's something almost divine about it, I mean - it basically created modern PC experience out of nothingness.
I wish there was still a way to get an Alto these days. My favorite computer, and I'll likely never own one!
I found an emulator for the system/software - so you can play around with one.
Yes, Josh Dersch from the LCM wrote an excellent emulator. Ken used it extensively in this restoration to reverse engineer how the microcode should works. It is called Contralto. Available here: www.livingcomputers.org/Discover/News/ContrAlto-A-Xerox-Alto-Emulator.aspx
SkuldChan42 SALTO doesn't work very well and ContrAlto doesn't have a Windows EXE last I knew, nor support for me to use my own disks.
I rather like the vertical display, but it's very difficult to find a vertically oriented CRT that's compatible with a more modern computer these days.
Search ebay for "radius computer monitor" - they are expensive, but at the time it was a full page CRT made for the Mac (and later on Windows PC's).
SkuldChan42 I meant for a reasonable price, but I see what you mean.
How can't Xerox headquarters understand the value of this machine at the time?!?
after watching a fair number of vids on your channel, i decided on subbing you.
Fantastic series, I especially like the info on the Diablo, filing that knowledge away for when I get to servicing my own Diablo 31's.
What I don't get is why it appears you gave up so easily on repairing the mouse top bearing. Tiny ballraces are readily available, I even have some around that size in my parts stash. Measure the OD, ID and width with a digital capiler or micrometer and obtain one, and if housing disassmbly is destructive then you could get a watchmaker or someone with a watchmaker's lathe to turn up a replacement shaft if necessary. For such a valuable item it's worth really trying all approaches.
By the way, do you have the chorded keyset for this machine?
we do not have the chorded keyset. Would be interesting to borrow one from PARC and demonstrate programs that use this in addition to the mouse.
Thanks Carl. If you do get hold of one would you be able to take some measurements of it? It's been a dream of mine to draw up a CAD drawing of one, and make a working replica, original in appearance, to use with a modern PC someday.
Surprised you guys haven’t recreated the mouse with modern parts.
The main mouse ball looks to be the same size of a Pinball machine ball - i wonder ?
Pinball is 1 1/16” (27mm). That looks a little smaller.
I wonder what switches are in that keyboard?
X-Bravo is what the Xerox 860ips used under the name 250 Word Processing.
This is why it's also important to "take the class" on a software product, haha...
Was the cursor referred to as the "Caret' in X-Bravo like ViewPoint/(GVWIN)?
I remember in ViewPoint that you could click the mouse once at the beginning of a sentence and a character would be highlighted. Click again and a single word would be highlighted. Click again and the whole sentence would be highlighted.
Repairing an old mouse is not only a fiddly annoying chore it's also a minefield of double entendres
Nice
I took a picture of one of the Altos out in the wild that were donated to various places by Alan Kay. This one was in an office area behind a window in the technology wing at the Boston Museum of Science back in June of 2011. pbs.twimg.com/media/CyOIHe4XAAAzv3g.jpg:orig
I figured I'd comment this into the next Alto video you put up, but it seems that happened 5 days ago as of this post and I somehow didn't get notified about it! thanks youtube.
I don't know if the Alto is still publicly viewable or if it's been archived. I know I happened to find it by accident peeping through the window.
I'm hoping the emulator gets more love soon.
Hello, Ken!
It would be awesome if there was a way to digitize the video signal coming out of the Alto so that it could be preserved exactly rather than only through video. In theory, running it through an emulator will look about the same, but capturing the actual video signal would be more authentic.
It would be a bit difficult as the display is bit-mapped digital. I suppose it could be done with an FPGA.
douro20 You could digitize it with any modern digital oscilloscope that has long enough memory to store a complete frame of analog video signal (the video channel, i.e. luminance). And here “modern” extends back into the 90s at least. A LeCroy with 64MB of waveform memory will easily capture an entire frame with many samples per pixel. 8 bits is more than enough resolution for the monochrome (or is it grayscale?) video signal. Some German fellow whose name I forget got a fast reverse engineered connection to those abundant LeCroy digitizer boards (they are the heart of the 9xxx series of scopes, IIRC). You could also reduce the vertical resolution and dump it to a bunch of floppies (can be emulated) :) Or to a SCSI hard drive emulator. Not hard at all. And truly modern scopes with fast network connection can probably dump the video in real time over LXI. Just remember that a 10baseT Ethernet connection has more bandwidth than the video signal in this thing (assuming it’s monochrome).
could anyone explain how the mouse gets positional information with the 2 pairs of 5 prongs? I'm dying to know =)
Standard quadrature signals. Two signals in phase quadrature for each roller.
Crolling is the same as in xterm !
+CuriousMarc Were you from Germany, Russia, The Netherlands, or Scotland? I'm asking because of your accent.
CuriousMarc is originally from France, Luca is originally from Italy.
Luca did sound Italian to me!
Did Bravo have a spellchecker?
Add-on spellcheckers were still being sold in the early '80s, so i'd be surprised if 1973-vintage software had it.
Fluoropolymer is not copyrighted )))
None of that "Made in China" rubbish?