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.
This Day In Tech History
- 1987 - Perl is released via a newsgroup posting.
More Tech History
M.I.T introduces APT, a language used to instruct milling machine operations. Created by the Servomechanisms Laboratory, it demonstrated computer assisted manufacturing.
The first transistorized IBM computer is introduced. The 7030, aka The Stretch, sat at the top of the heap with 64-bit word.
ERMA is created. The digitized numbers on checks were created for Bank of America so that a special scanner could read numbers pre-printed in metallic ink.
The U.S. Army Signal Corps brings the MOBIDIC (MOBile Digial Computer) online for the first time. It was designed and built on contract by Sylvania.
The first fully transistorized mobile radios are introduced by Motorola.
The first office copier, the Xerox 914, arrives.