Xerox Alto Restoration + Emulation

From: Chandra Bajpai <cbajpai_at_comcast.net>
Date: Sun Aug 1 22:32:18 2004

This I find very cool...esp since I scored an Xerox Alto Users handbook
(thanks Bob!) at VCF/East.

 

Has anyone every heard of these guys.they seem to up in Canada and are
painstakingly restoring an Xerox Alto I since April 2003.

 



AINOTL begins restoration of Xerox Alto 1

April 2003



AINOTL Systems, Inc. (AINOTL) is pleased to announce the restoration of
a Xerox Alto 1 computer (1972). Only 200 were hand-made at the Xerox
PARC research facility - we have the only one known to exist. The Alto
featured the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG)
editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI),
and bit-mapped display, and offered menus and icons, linked to a local
area networks (first Ethernet device), implemented electronic mail, and
stored files simultaneously.

 

The webpage goes into great details of how they are restoring the
hardware along with a lot of pictures.

 

http://www.ainotl.com/alto.html

 

 

All this Alto fascination has got me wondering if anyone is working on
Alto emulation.If not I'd be interesting in starting this dauting task,
but don't think I know where to start. Do binaries of the
ROM/OS/Applications exist? I'm sure Al Kossow must have Alto hardware
docs. Are there any roadblocks in trying to build an Alto Emulator
(I've always wondered why an Alto Emulator doesn't exists yet.but I ask
the same of my 2nd favorite machine - the Apple Lisa). Anyone else
interested in undertaking this task?

 

-Chandra

 
Received on Sun Aug 01 2004 - 22:32:18 BST

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