My father, who was working at Exxon at the time, got special permission through his boss to visit PARC some time, he thinks, between 78-82... not entirely sure. He is pretty certain it was before Jobs visited, but he can't be sure. Apparently he had to all but sign his first born away (*phew*) that he wouldn't leak any secrets. What he is crystal clear on is that he was shown the Alto and the Dorado and not the Star and that Xerox had no commericial products of the GUI computer ilk. He would later purchase a Star as part of responsibilities at Exxon, probably around 1983. As to how Xerox could have dropped the ball.. it is more like how could they not have dropped the ball. They were a *copier* company and they were making money hand over fist selling copiers. This new fangled computer business? Meh. They also lost out on the personal laser printer and Ethernet (double doh!). On 8/17/2020 3:07 PM, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Turns out it was Altos. The Star was the commercialized successor to the Alto.
On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 2:59 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:08 AM Andrew Diller <dillera@gmail.com> wrote:
I know DavidG has done some amazing work (along with other members) on VCF's 8010 (*Dandelion)*... And strangely enough the same day (yesterday) someone on the SGI Discord I frequent posted this amazing video, which I thought I'd share to interested people here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Dlr5rY9SI
Of a Daybreak (*Xerox 6085)* booting up into ViewPoint 2.0 and using the apps. VCF also has a Daybreak which would be great to get fully functional again as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Daybreak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
I'm not sure of the dates, but do people know if the Xerox Star would have been the system that Jobs and the Apple team viewed at Xerox back when they had their infamous visits? Or were those Altos?
I wonder if the book "Dealers of Lightning" has any details about this.
-andy
-- ========================================= Jeff Brace Vice President & Board Member Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey@vcfed.org cell: 732-759-1783