The irony is that Steve Jobs could’ve caught the Alto on television.
In late 1979, a 24-year-old Jobs visited Xerox PARC — the research lab where Xerox engineers had built a new-age machine called the Alto — and the myth is that the visit inspired Jobs and his company, Apple Computer, to create the Macintosh. For years, people have ridiculed Xerox for inviting Jobs inside the lab and letting him steal such important ideas.
But the truth is that the Mac wasn’t the Alto knock-off everyone thinks it was, and, well, the Alto wasn’t exactly a secret: Xerox shot a television commercial trumpeting the machine, and chances are, it aired well before Jobs’ visit.
The commercial (below) isn’t the most detailed document of the Alto, and it may even stretch the truth near the end. But more than thirty years on, it provides at least a small window into how the world viewed the Alto’s graphical user interface — and why Steve Jobs got so very excited when he saw it.
Only a minute long, the commercial begins with an average businessman grabbing his morning coffee and heading into his office, where he sits down at an Alto. He then starts talking to the machine — which makes no sense whatsoever. The Alto was an amazing machine: it had a mouse and graphical user interface. It plugged into an Ethernet network. And it could print your spreadsheets on a laser printer. But if you talked it, you just looked silly, especially if — like this guy — you called it “Fred.”
After a bit of smalltalk, Mr. Businessman checks his email and prints it out, and you can see the Alto in action. According to Kathy Jarvis, the current librarian at PARC, this is best video document of the machine we have. “There were real names in the emails he was looking at, and that was really what our email screen looked like,” Jarvis says.
The ad goes a little off the rails at the end, when Fred reminds the businessman that he should buy flowers for his wife. But according to Jarvis, the graphics displayed by the machine are probably the real thing. “It may have been slow to load, but it could draw flowers like that,” she says. “We had animations going in the mid-70s.”
Jarvis says that the commercial was shot in the lobby of Xerox PARC, and that the people milling about at the beginning are actual PARC employees. The orange walls were brought in just for the shoot — and so was the overly talkative businessman.
The ad was meant to whet the world’s appetite for the commercial version of the Alto, the Star, which would arrive a few years later — and fail miserably in the face of competition from the Macintosh.
We can’t be sure it aired on television. But it most likely did. “We believe they all appeared somewhere, but perhaps the Alto commercial was not shown nationwide,” Jarvis says. The video below comes not from PARC, but from the archives of the Computer History Museum, and it was donated to the museum on a VHS video tape marked May 14, 1979, according to History Museum researcher Sarah Lott. Presumably, it was taped from a TV broadcast on that date.
That was about a half decade after the Alto was first built by legendary researchers such as Alan Kay and Bob Metcalf and Chuck Thacker. The machine drew on earlier research from Douglas Engelbart — the inventor of the mouse — but it was a truly seminal machine, laying the foundation for so many of things we now take granted.
But you couldn’t talk to it.
