Talk:Xerox Alto

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I find it hard to believe this computer used an optical mouse.

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Anyhow, it might have used an optical mouse, but not of the current style with a fancy image sensor and digital image processing. The original optical mice required a special mousepad printed with blue and grey lines, and could only detect mouse movement relative to those lines. See the Mouse_(computing)#Optical_mice. --Brouhaha 03:20, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

"The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, was the first personal computer" -- This page says otherwise: http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml and no, --Brouhaha, I won't sign my contributions to talk pages, edit it and sign it for me, god your lazy.

Looking at the link, I think the claim that this is the first personal computer is justified. The earlier ones don't quite deserve that label, although they are pretty interesting. It would also be nice to have references to Englebart and NLS in the history of the Alto.--Gerry Gleason 16:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

The Alto never used the Mouse Systems Optical Mouse, the one with the striped mousepad. It did have optical encoders on the shafts of a ball mouse. At one time "optical" meant an optical encoder rather than a mechanical encoder to turn rotational motion into quadrature signals. The quadrature output was directly connected to a readible register, and software interpreted the signals into curson position changes. --User:brtech

[edit] operating system

What OS did the Alto use? Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 02:23, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Usually the Alto Operating System. Back in the early 1970s, if you developed a new computer you generally had to write your own operating system, as there weren't yet any COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) operating systems like Unix, CP/M, MS-DOS, or Microsoft Windows. --Brouhaha 18:28, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Microcomputer, not Minicomputer

The first sentence of the article says it is a minicomputer. Minicomputers are the precursor's to today's midrange computers, smaller than mainframes but still client-server architecture. The Alto is a microcomputer, analagous to personal computer or desktop computer which is not a dumb terminal. --64.34.243.218 Peter in Vancouver

There are varying definitions of minicomputer and microcomputer. The hardware design of the Alto is similar to that of contemporary minicomputers such as the Nova and PDP-11. The term "microcomputer" didn't even exist when the Alto was designed. The most common usage of microcomputer for many years was a computer using a microprocessor as its CPU; the Alto certainly doesn't qualify as a microcomputer with that definition. (However, today even IBM mainframes would qualify as microcomputers with that definition.) --Brouhaha 21:15, 21 March 2007 (UTC)