HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ AlbertCory

A really fun bit of trivia that I discovered in researching my second book was: DataPoint, arguably, sold the first personal computer.

I'm sure you don't believe that, if you've even heard of that company. They were huge in the 70s, a public company, and they had a terminal that did not require a mainframe connection, i.e. a PC.

Their concept of a PC, though, was "You can do your data entry offline, and then when you're connected, you upload the data! It's magic!" No third-party apps, no "apps" of any kind, and of course not for retail sales.

They also had a LAN, ARCNet, which was a 4MB token ring that ran over regular twisted pair. It was solid, too.

⬐ ncmncm

Arcnet was 3 Mbps, I think. Linux had drivers for it until after 2000, and pushed IP packets through it. People loved their Arcnet.

Apple, meanwhile, had AppleTalk over RS-422. Was it 1/2 Mbps?

⬐ jecel

AppletTalk was 0.23 Mbps.

Arcnet was a token bus (like IEEE 802.4 from General Motors' MAP) and not a token ring (like IEEE 802.5 from IBM's Zurich research).

⬐ nullc

Arcnet was really widely used-- in fact, it's still somewhat used in industrial control systems. Compared to Ethernet it was extremely robust and somewhat less expensive. Although it was a fair bit slower it tended to hold up better under load.

I've probably still got some ISA arcnet cards kicking around in a box someplace.

⬐ Suzuran

"extremely robust" is no joke. I once saw someone win a bet by successfully running Arcnet over a barbed wire fence.

⬐ LargoLasskhyfv

How far? I once ran 10Base2 over dozens of meters of twisted pair for doorbells. The ISA 3c509s just made a very high pitched sound, but didn't get extraordinary warm, smelled funny, or smoke. Otherwise everything normal. Worked. For a few days, until the 'real stuff' arrived :-)

⬐ Suzuran

300 feet/90 meters or so or so? It was a fence running along the property line adjacent to two buildings. I remember there being enough room to park a couple tractor-trailers between them, so 300 feet sounds about right.

⬐ LargoLasskhyfv

You win! :-)

⬐ AlbertCory

Gordon Peterson, the chief architect of it, told me that he had a standing bet with his QA engineers to buy them a steak dinner if they found a bug. He didn't need to buy very many.

⬐ rexreed

Xerox really missed out - inventing the GUI, laser printer, and ethernet among other things. How did IBM and Apple take over and Xerox end up as a has-been also ran? What went wrong in their commercialization of revolutionary technology?

⬐ thought_alarm

The lesson of Xerox PARC is this: Even if you're 10 years ahead of everyone technologically, it's still impossible to predict how the market will unfold.

The arrival of Visicalc transformed the toy personal computers into legitimate business tools and set Apple on its course for what would be the largest IPO in US history up to that point. No one saw it coming until it happened.

Once it happened, the Xerox brass in New York question how they missed it, and start to demand a return on the money they've been pouring into PARC. This is what led them to seek a partnership with Apple and the infamous Alto demos for Steve Jobs.

Meanwhile, the PARC folks start to realize that the rest of this now exponentially expanding industry is going to catch up to what they're doing faster than they can scale down their stuff into a commercially viable product.

Xerox takes a huge swing with the Xerox Star. It's a market failure for a number of reasons. IBM takes a little swing with the PC, and it's a huge success, but they don't control the software. The PARC folks leave to join the rest of the industry, taking what they learned with them.

⬐ ncmncm

Xerox Star was $25,000, and came with all the software they had: WP, spreadsheet, file manager. Coded in Pascal.

Apple Lisa was $10,000. Same, otherwise. ("Clascal", compiled to bytecodes interpreted by 5 MHz 68k.)

Mac was less, but a toy. A little later, Mac 512 (i.e. 1/2MB RAM) was kinda usable, with a pair of 140kB floppies. $2000? Had a monochrome 1bpp paint program, no WP, no spreadsheet. You bought MacWrite separately ($125?), and Multiplan (a proto-Excel) from MS.

The LaserWriter came out pretty quickly after, making it radically more useful. That had a computer inside much beefier than the Mac driving it; they could have put a keyboard, mouse, and monitor connector on the Laserwriter and had a much more useful product much sooner.

⬐ jecel

Small (and not important) correction: the original Mac floppies were 400KB and went to 800KB in the Mac Plus. The Apple II floppies were 140KB.

⬐ ncmncm

Correction is correct.

⬐ AlbertCory

There are lots of books and articles about that. I wrote one myself, and I was there. "Inventing the Future". https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future

For B-school analysis, this isn't your book, but if you want to know what it was like to live through it without knowing the outcome, this is it.

I really tried to get the numbers to back up Dave Liddle's assertion that Xerox made enough from laser printing, all by itself, to make up for all the costs of PARC and commercialization. That data's long gone. Anyhow, they did commercialize laser printing pretty effectively, although obviously not well enough.

⬐ matt_s

The interesting bit that seems to be forgotten was that the US Govt went after Xerox for monopoly reasons [0]. That is how much profit they made picking one of the many technologies that came out of PARC. If they had picked multiple maybe they wouldn't have been as successful? Its really hard for a company to excel in multiple different physical product lines.

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/13/archives/xerox-monopoly-o...

⬐ AlbertCory

The timeline is off. The antitrust complaint was about xerography, which did not come out of PARC.

There IS a connection, though: Xerox settled the suit by licensing its patents, which led management to think "holy shit, we're losing the monopoly, we'd better do something" and start up PARC.

⬐ matt_s

You are right, I was thinking about this earlier and that I think the government forced Xerox to release laser printer patents in the mid 1980's but as an unpaid internet commenter I ended up at an article from a decade before then.

⬐ AlbertCory

> the government forced Xerox to release laser printer patents

Really? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I don't recall that.

⬐ matt_s

It was in the 70s and copiers. From Wikipedia:

“Following these years of record profits, in 1975, Xerox resolved an anti-trust suit with the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which at the time was under the direction of Frederic M. Scherer. The Xerox consent decree resulted in the forced licensing of the company's entire patent portfolio, mainly to Japanese competitors. Within four years of the consent decree, Xerox's share of the U.S. copier market dropped from nearly 100% to less than 14%.[31]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s

⬐ GeekyBear

> How did IBM and Apple take over and Xerox end up as a has-been also ran?

They were too far ahead of their time. The component costs needed to come down first.

In 1981, the "starter kit" for their office system consisted of one Xerox Star for a user, a second Star to act as a file and print server, and a laser printer for about a quarter of a million dollars in today's money.

Each additional networked Star that you added was about $50,000 in today's money.

Even at those prices, the system wasn't exactly snappy. I do wonder what would have happened if they had kept iterating on the product until faster, cheaper components arrived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

⬐ AlbertCory

They did keep iterating on the product until faster, cheaper components arrived. They had a product called GlobalView, which lasted all through the 80s and early 90s. Of course I know some people who stuck with it.

What they couldn't wrap their heads around was: no one cared anymore. The world had moved on.

⬐ FullyFunctional

I don't think that was the fundamental issue. It was one of mindset. Xerox tried to sell to their existing customers, with the same sales structure and pricing they were used to. They simply weren't structurally set up to deal with mass-market consumers. The Macintosh team targeted a completely different set customers, with a less ambitious and much cheaper product.

The IBM story is a bit of an outlier, but Microsoft saw the same potential Apple did.

⬐ TheOtherHobbes

I think it was both. No one in Xerox management understood that they could grow a new market - possibly with loss leader hardware sales - instead of trying to farm their existing market.

So the Alto was never properly productised. It was essentially a boutique product at a big-mini price. That made it competitive with DEC and IBM minis, but not with budget the $10k S100 systems that were just about - barely - powerful enough for a small business.

To be fair to Xerox, six figure systems weren't unusual for business customers at that time. Which could be why the company never understood that it had the key to popular budget semi- and non-pro commodity computing.

DEC died for much the same reason. DEC management were used to selling to fellow nerds and business people, and couldn't imagine super-affordable commodity products.

MS, Apple, and the IBM clone makers saw the new market for what it was. So did some of the new software houses.

IBM itself almost did, but couldn't quite shake its monopoly-oriented culture. So MS and the clones killed it in the commodity space.

⬐ ncmncm

The Alto was super-slow, even by standards of the time. It had a very, very limited CPU running an emulation of a more powerful ISA that app code was compiled to.

Things we expect to have dedicated hardware for -- network interface, display screen painter, disk interface, laser printer driver -- were just interrupt routines all on the one CPU. Programs competed for CPU time with feeding pixels out to the CRT-scanning electron beam, and with bits moving directly to and from disk-head R/W coils.

It did switch between those tasks pretty quickly, not like most machines then or today: there was no foolishness about saving and restoring registers. Each interrupt task was assigned a couple of registers permanently, including its own program counter, so an interrupt only ever just flipped which program counter was in charge.

The app-level instruction interpreter got to use what few registers remained.

So, on an interrupt, it would execute a half-dozen instructions to move one machine word, and yield. There were 16 PCs that ran in strict priority order, with the user-program instruction interpreter last in line. Each "yield" put the current PC back to the entry point for the next word to be processed, and the next live lower-priority PC determined the instruction to run next.

The OS was just one of those user programs.

It resembled the I/O processor on CDC mainframes of the time. It just ran the programs, too, not only the I/O.

But it really is amazing what they got it to do. Later machines e.g. Dorado and Dolphin had more stuff done in hardware so could be faster.

⬐ dflock

In addition to what GeekyBear correctly stated, Xerox were photocopier salesman: the company was run by photocopier salesman and their global sales people were all photocopier salesman.

They had no idea what to do with this stuff and no real desire to understand it, nor sell it.

If it'd been 1/10th of the price, that probably wouldn't have mattered too much, but...

⬐ ncmncm

Xerox really hated selling equipment. They wanted to lease things for MRR.

⬐ AlbertCory

That's where you're wrong. There was a special sales force to sell the Star. It was small, though: maybe 100 people. Photocopier salesmen weren't allowed to sell it.

⬐ macintux

Kodak invented the CCD and it (eventually) nearly killed them. Inventing something and knowing how to exploit it are two different skills.

Plus Clayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

⬐ Stratoscope

They weren't the only ones. In the 1970s I worked for Tymshare, a pioneering timesharing company. In a way, we were the "cloud computing" of the day, but with no local compute at all.

Just Teletype machines and then "glass teletypes": a CRT terminal that merely mimicked a Teletype with scrolling text, but with the disadvantage that if something scrolled off the screen you couldn't reach behind it and pull up the pile of paper to look at your old code. It was gone.

They were quiet though.

Later I discovered a "programmable terminal" in a side office/storage room that no one used. It might have been a Datapoint 2200 or something similar. Whatever it was, it had a processor and a character mode screen buffer that you could address directly.

Naturally, I immediately wrote Conway's Game of Life for it in assembly language.

When my manager saw this, he was fairly gentle: "Mike, that must have been fun to program. But we have business needs. Can you please forget about this useless machine and get back to work?"

I had more success with another programmable terminal: a Texas Instruments DS990/1. I found this in the back room of our Texas office, after I flew down to design and implement our usual Teletype "print a question, you type in the answer" interface. Then I saw that I could put the entire UI on an interactive screen, and stayed up all night implementing it.

Our sales team and customers loved it, so this one made us some money.

Not long after that, we hired Douglas Engelbart. Yes, that Douglas Engelbart.

Obviously, someone in the company had taken an interest in what Doug was doing, but he never got any resources to build his vision of the future.

I worked in the same building and often walked by his corner cubicle. With my own interest in more human-oriented interfaces, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I'd introduced myself. But I was a shy young geek and walked on by.

Sometimes it's just the wrong place, at the wrong time.

⬐ a-dub

i remember tymnet! their local dial-up pops fueled a lot of the commercial information services (compuserve, genie, prodigy, aol) that were popular in the 80s and 90s.

⬐ Stratoscope

Very cool. Fun fact: much of Tymnet was the work of LaRoy Tymes. And neither Tymshare nor Tymnet were named after him!

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10265798...

⬐ nielsbot

Cue the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator

⬐ akamaka

One interesting detail of the ad is that the actor clearly has no idea how to use a mouse — of course he would have never seen one before. I’d completely forgotten there was such a time.

⬐ ncmncm

Funny, you see him poke the mouse once, with one finger. They really went out of their way to make him useless and helpless. For reasons.

At that time, being seen actually using anything technical -- most especially, typing -- would have made him a clerk, working-class, and not white-collar enough for anybody making budget choices to identify with.

There is no middle class anymore.

⬐ Apocryphon

The thing the tech industry missed: vertical monitors by default.

⬐ mhd

Like the Blit and a lot of Wirth's ETH Zurich machines?

I think there was some Swedish Unix 68k system that had a pivot CRT rather early on, too.

⬐ cmrdporcupine

I can't say enough good things about the new LG DualUp. It's what I have on my desk.

⬐ mjevans

They existed for a while; but were odd and expensive and by the time cheap commodity PCs could push enough pixels to make one worth using they were also often pulling double duty as DVD players, with 4:3 and 16:9 ratio content.

Mid-range and higher monitors often have stands that allow for 90 degree rotation of the screen, so the wide screens could shift to vertical; sadly a good way to openly communicate that back to the GPU and OS hasn't been a priority.

⬐ Maakuth

The timeline here seems quite contracted. Windows PCs started to really sell after launch of 3.0 and the PCs with that did not even have CD-ROM drives by default, let alone DVD. I would say DVD drives started to be a norm at least a decade after the rise of commodity PCs, if you count from Windows 3.0 launch in 1990. And in the PCs that first shipped with DVD drives, the CPUs were not powerful enough to decode DVD video in real time so accelerator cards (and their crummy software) were needed, keeping the appeal limited.

⬐ chaosbutters314

this hurts to see being posted after we just had layoffs

⬐ neilv

Interesting.

This 1979 Xerox innovative white-screen computer commercial, pitching the corporate executive eating a pastry at desk while forwarding memos to the different divisions.

The 1984 Apple innovative white-screen computer commercial pitches very differently. (And Apple's message actually more in line with what I've read that PARC researchers were interested in.)

⬐ dtgriscom

I remember spending hours playing MazeWar on Altos at MIT in the early 80s. Big fun.

⬐ traceroute66

Reminds me of BBC "How to send an 'E mail'" from Tommorow's World.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA

⬐ ChrisMarshallNY

We used one of those, at my first job.

⬐ masswerk

Was this really a commercial? I think, I've seen this earlier described as an (internal) image film.

⬐ gumby

I first used an Alto around 78 so it’s interesting they had an “ad” in 79. Perhaps it was part of the internal bake off.

Over lunch a few years later Alan told me about trying to get Xerox to sell Altos. There was a bake-off back in NY between the Alto and a orange-screen fixed-character machine (perhaps running CPM?) with no mouse, no network, no bitmapped display, just a small screen. No laser printing. Anyway the latter won.

A few years later Alan was on a plane and when talking to his seat mate found they’d both worked for Xerox — in fact that guy had made the decision or at least was in on it! So Alan asked how the decision had been made and the guy shrugged and said “well they were basically the same, so we went with the one that was cheaper to make”.

⬐ space_ghost

Calling those two machines the same would be like calling a Curtiss JN-4 and a Messerschmitt ME 232 "the same." Sure, they both fly and use fixed wings to attain lift, but that's where the similarities end. That's some spectacular failure of leadership. O_O

⬐ gumby

It looks that way in retrospect (and looked that way to me at the time!) but here’s a bit of sympathy for the decision:

1 - in those days executives, and even other white collar “professionals”, typically male, didn’t type. They had secretaries who took dictation, typed things up, made corrections, and then used, Xerox photocopiers to make copies which would be distributed. So the use case wasn't clear.

2 - for all of those reasons they probably looked at specs (screen? Yep. keyboard? Yep. Network? What's that?) and thought they were making a shrewd decision. And perhaps they were: nobody even knew they needed a WYSIWYG editor much less mail (and this was Xerox, a paper management company -- why would they embrace electronic mail?). Microsoft swooped up Simonyi and he rewrote his Bravo editor as the original version of Word (the only part of office originally written by Microsoft?). The Alto wasn't as expensive as the later Star (also a failure) but I think each one cost about 10K in 1980 dollars.

As far as I know the only Altos and Dovers outside PARC were MIT, Stanford and the White House. Probably CMU too.

⬐ ncmncm

Both had buttons and a monochrome screen, and ran programs.

What got my attention was how slowly text was painted on the screen, in the ad. I wonder if that was artificial. People used to be weirded out by computers being "too fast". They thought it must be taking a shortcut and not processing everything it ought to. Coders had to insert delay loops so it would look like something was happening. Yes, really true.

My employer in 1982 bought a Xerox CP/M machine, thinking it ought to have some PARC mojo. Probably that one.

⬐ gumby

By today's standards it was slow, but the video looked slow to me too. I remember it as faster and I know the last time I typed at one (at the LCM about five or six years ago) it didn't seem that slow to me.

If you read Butler Lampson's paper on the design of the Alto you'll see it was an amazing machine. Super screen-oriented (i.e. human-oriented): the bus clock was 3/2 the screen refresh speed, so the majority of the bus bandwidth was spent refreshing the screen! Absurd and crazy at its time, but of course now we realize that it was brilliant. All built out of a handful of MSI and SSI TTL parts IIRC.

Actually the paper is by Thacker, McCreight, Lampson and Sproull. Really a great read.

⬐ ncmncm

It did a very great deal with amazingly little physical hardware.

As much as people complained about its performance, I would have been proud to have designed it.

⬐ andrekandre

  > “well they were basically the same, so we went with the one that was cheaper to make”

wow, i wonder if thats a case of business people don't understand technology, or just a bad case of communication/marketing to execs?

Well, unix is another really bad OS compared to it's historical predecessors: at first they decide for a bad programming language to need less hw horsepower and separate that cheap language from the user language (C for the system, for "complex" things, shell scripts for the end user), for equal reasons they decide that's no need for GUIs, while far before unix we have had GUIs, touch monitor, even the world first video-conference with screen sharing in LAN (the so called Mother of all the Demos, in 1968 [1] then they realize that's was not that good and graphic systems start to appear on Unix, far limited, complex, that completely violate unix principles since for GUIs there were no IPCs, classic PostScript GUIs do support some user-programming but not really something like classic systems, CDE support a certain integration but again nothing like classic systems.

Since them all "modern" systems keep rediscovering in limited, limited and bug ridden ways what historical systems have done far better decades before...

I think many should just see classic advertisement like https://youtu.be/M0zgj2p7Ww4 than see it's date and where we are today...

It's not only security it's the overall design. In the past hw resources was limited an so hacks and slowness were common, hw itself being "in a pioneering phase" was full of hacks and ugliness but evolving those systems would have led us too the moon while we are still in the middle age...

[1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY