Advanced cargo cult?

"If we do our research in these buildings that are invested with the psychic energy of Alan Kay, surely success will follow!"

But perhaps the culture is truly transcendant.

#XeroxPARC

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/25/xerox_parc_goodbye/

Have you been aware that we are now living in a world of computing created by Alto in the Xerox PARC R&D laboratory? It debuted in the early spring of 1973.

The Alto was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user.

#SteveJobs and a whole team from #Apple toured PARC in 1979. Viewing Alto’s graphical user interface, Jobs had what he later described as an epiphany, one that reoriented his efforts at Apple forever after. He quickly hired Larry Tesler from PARC.

PARC researcher Charles Simonyi left for #Microsoft , where he would work to turn Bravo into Word and launch Microsoft into the world of application software.

In the early 1980s, an entire group of researchers left PARC to start #Adobe.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto

#XEROX #HISTORY #COMPUTERS #SOFTWARE #XEROX #PARC #ALTO #XEROXPARC #XEROXALTO #COMPUTERHISTORY

"My book will outlast Zuckerberg's metaverse, people can go read the novel anytime they want,"

https://metanews.com/metaverse-creator-stephenson-opens-up-on-it-30-years-later/

#meta #metaverse #oculus #lalmina1 #nealstephenson #snowcrash #WEF #xeroxparc

@donmelton actually yes, there are tweets by others that I’ve engaged with that are pretty good and contain links to great resources sometimes. History, computing, science, art, etc. It’s very easy to even forget they ever happened. This one for ex was a recent bookmark I saved: https://twitter.com/dynamicwebpaige/status/1571463861160534017

#AlanKay #XeroxParc

That PDF of an interview with Larry Tesler has one of the best breakdowns around the way that innovation happens (related to the story of the mouse) imaginable.

I said, you know, “This button is going to be pushed a lot and people are going—their hands are going to tire if it’s too stiff. And the button is going to wear out.” He said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. This button is rated for 40,000 presses.” I said, “Uh… 40,000 presses—I don’t think that’s enough. How many years you think that’s going to be?” He said, “I don’t know. Several years for sure.” And so we did a little calculation on the back of a napkin and I said, you know, “Ten button presses a minute and so and so an hour, eight- hour day, you know, 3 million button presses,” or something like that.

It's got everything: Physical hardware, cutting and pasting, and Apple deciding on a single button. Starts on page 26. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746675

(Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler)

#retrocomputing #apple #xeroxparc #nomodes