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By Root 576 0

were an entirely new medium, that they were far more than stolid, passive devices suitable for crunching numbers and editing prose. Some of the PARC researchers possessed the imaginative vision of flexible machines that would eventually combine the sensory charms of color television, stereophonic music, and finger paints. Like others before them, they said their eventual goal was to pop a computer into a case the size of a notebook or build a machine that businessmen could slip into their briefcases but use to communicate with other computers and people anywhere in the world.

In 1973 the PARC researchers built their first machine and called it Alto. Its chief virtues were a visual appeal and far greater flexibility than other computers of the time. It was supposed to simulate the sort of sights that people were already familiar with rather than boggling reels of numbers.

The Alto rested on advances in both software and hardware. Xerox developed a language called Smalltalk, which had similarities to Logo, a language that had been designed to help children program by moving and turning small, familiar objects without having to worry about codes and equations. For charts or memos that were too large to be displayed at one time, the Xerox computer simulated sheets of papers strewn on a desk and, in the jargon of the trade, called them “overlapping windows.”

The clarity of the images was made possible by a process known as bit-mapping. The computer controlled each tiny dot, or pixel, on the screen. Text could be displayed in several type-faces and the computer could generate music. The Alto also used a mouse—originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute in 1964—to sidestep the codes of typewritten commands. By the late seventies, a hundred or so Altos were scattered about the White House and congressional offices as part of a splashy field test.

At first Jobs resisted the entreaties to visit Xerox, leaving others with the impression that nothing any other company was working on could possibly top some of the projects Apple had on the boil. A few of the Apple programmers familiar with the Xerox work kept pressing, and eventually he gave in to this own curiosity. With his impatience for anything but the practical and a willingness to admire anything with superior virtues, Jobs was enchanted by what he saw. He was as impressed as everybody else with the performance of the Alto and after seeing the combined effect of the mouse, the graphics, and the overlapping windows, turned to Bill Atkinson for some expert guidance. “Steve asked how long it would take to get the software up on Lisa and I said, ‘Oh, six months.’”

The visits to Xerox became one of those few, crucial events that helped bring some clarity to the shape of Apple’s computers. For a small company to even contemplate trying to match, let alone better, the Xerox work required something more than substantial confidence. But without a dose of audacity and a bolt of arrogance it would have been easy for Apple to play safe and incur the greater risk of doing nothing. The visits to Xerox also coincided with a hardening of the idea in Cupertino that Lisa would be the spearhead for Apple’s attack on the office market. Businesses, so the argument went, would be able to afford to pay for machines that someday would be cheap enough for the general consumer.

The results of this flurry of activity were seen quickly enough. Within a few weeks Jobs managed to get hold of a mouse while the programmers started to delve into bit-map graphics and worked up some demonstrations of their power. The displays were so impressive that they prompted a palace coup. Most of the engineers turned against the stubborn bent of the chief hardware engineer, who was eventually replaced by the project’s fourth hardware manager. It was also tacit recognition of the triumph of software.

So Apple’s course was set by Xerox. A group of Xerox programmers and scientists eventually left PARC and joined Apple to work on Lisa and had a great influence on how the computer would appear to a user.