Today in 1972, Butler Lampson at Xerox PARC sent a memo to his management asking for funding for the development of a number of Alto personal computers.
Lampson wrote: “If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal computers are correct, we should be able to demonstrate them convincingly on Alto. If they are wrong, we can find out why.”
The Alto, inspired by Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos,” in turn inspired Steve Jobs when he first saw it in December 1979. Jobs was specifically taken by the Alto’s graphical user interface (GUI) later used in Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh personal computers. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson, “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”
In September 1981, Thomas Wadlow wrote in Byte magazine:
It is unlikely that a person outside of the computer-science research community will ever be able to buy an Alto. They are not intended for commercial sale, but rather as development tools for Xerox, and so will not be mass-produced. What makes them worthy of mention is the fact that a large number of the personal computers of tomorrow will be designed with knowledge gained from the development of the Alto.