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
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.
-Popular Mechanics, March 1949More Tech History
Compaq produces the first clone of the IBM PC, running the same software.
Microsoft announces Word and Windows.
The MIDI [ Musical Instrument Digital Interface ] is introduced.
The Apple Lisa is introduced.
Lotus Software releases Lotus 123 and it becomes the hottest spreadsheet of it's day.
The first version of Novell Netware is released. Bundled with it is Snipes, one of the first network games.
Gavilan Computer releases the Gavilan SC, one of the earliest computers marketed as a laptop.