Museum releases source code of first ‘modern PC’

A computer museum has released the source code of the first computer with a gui, mouse, desktop and an ethernet port. The Xerox Alto was a prototype that the company has ultimately only used internally since 1973.

It is not the entire source code, but part of it: the code is published on the site of the Computer History Museum in the American city of Mountain View. There is also a ‘guided’ version with code comments to explain things. It is the first time that part of the source code of the Xerox Alto computer has appeared online.

The Alto was the first ‘modern’ PC that had keyboard and mouse control. That control was necessary, because it was the first computer with a gui. It used the metaphor of a desktop for organizing files and the software used icons and windows, as current operating systems do. Xerox also made a drawing program for the Alto such as Paint and a word processor with a wysiwyg editor such as Word would receive later.

It also had an Ethernet connection with a maximum speed of 3Mbit/s to connect the computer to other devices such as printers and to the Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet as we know it today. This made the Alto the first PC to resemble computers as they are still in use today.

Xerox never released the Alto: about 1,500 were made, which Xerox used internally and distributed to universities. It did, however, release the Xerox Star in 1981, which is the first available PC with a graphical interface. In the years that followed, many companies with their own graphical interface followed, including VisiCorp Vision and the operating system Apple created for its Lisa computer in 1983.