The Xerox Alto was designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It was the first personal computer with a desktop/GUI. Designed by Chuck Thacker, it had 128kb of memory that was expandable to a whopping 512kb. It also held a hard drive with a 2.5mb cartridge, all inside a small refrigerator-size housing. It boasted a black and white CRT display, an Ethernet connection, three button mouse, keyboard, and chord keyset borrowed from the oNLine System. The Alto was also capable of input from a variety of devices, such as a tv camera, daisywheel printer, and sported a parallel port. It also had the ability to control external disk drives, making it a file server.
Category Archives: 1973
Ethernet
In a thesis submitted to Harvard University in 1973, Bob Metcalfe outlines the foundation for a new networking protocol he calls “Ethernet” , representing the architecture of a LAN, creating what would eventually be the standard internetworking system. It is interesting to note his original dissertation regarding the ARPANet was rejected because it contained too much engineering and not enough theory. He later revised it after he studied ALOHAnet, which had the theory he was lacking and allowed the paper to be accepted.
Metcalfe molded his ideas into a new network architecture, which he called Ethernet after the word “ether”, borrowing a transmission protocol from ALOHAnet in which messages wait for a pause in the activity and then retransmit. The first Ethernet system was completed in May, 1973 at Xerox and operated at 3 mbps. In 1980 Xerox began marketing systems running at 10 mbps. This architecture would later cement Ethernet as the standard in the early 1980’s.
Bob Metcalfe
Robert (Bob) Metcalfe was a pioneer in computing, creating the first theory about ethernet networking, which has become the industry standard. Born 1946 in Brooklyn, NY, he was sure he wanted to be an electrical engineer and go to MIT by age 10. He enrolled in 1964, leaving five years later with his dream. Subsequently he earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard.
While working at Xerox in 1973, he invented ethernet. In 1979 he formed 3Com, which everyone is familiar with today, and thanks to Metcalfe’s management and marketing skills propelled ethernet to the defacto standard and cemented 3Com as a Fortune 500 company. After leaving in 1990 he began to voice his concerns about problems in computing and networking, and in 1993 he became vice president of International Data Group. In 1995 he caused a debate by declaring that the internet would collapse by 1996. Although a few ISPs suffered setbacks during that period, they were minor and did not bring the web to it’s knees. Metcalfe responded by eating his words-literally, blending his own magazine column and consuming the beverage at the 1997 Sixth International World Wide Web Conference.
Micral
The Micral was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a micro-processor, the Intel 8008. Thi Truong developed the computer and Philippe Kahn the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that didn’t require high performance.
Intel 8008
The Intel 8008 was an early CPU designed and manufactured by Intel. It was released in April 1974 running at 2MHz, and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor design. It was used in many early computers, and formed the basis for machines running CP/M.
The 8008 was twice as powerful as the 4004. A 1974 article in Radio Electronics referred to a device called the Mark-8 which used the 8008. The Mark-8 is known as one of the first computers for the home –one that by today’s standards was difficult to build, maintain and operate.
TV Typewriter
The TV Typewriter was designed by Don Lancaster. It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A 90-minute cassette tape provided supplementary storage for about 100 pages of text.