Xerox Alto

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.