For what its worth... through a friend I met a
retired Xerox executive about 15 years ago.
He claimed to be the one responsible for "dropping the ball".
According to him, he was tasked with analyzing the business
opportunities for "PC"s
and reported back to the brass that there was nothing worth
pursuing.
On 8/17/2020 4:46 PM, Adam Michlin via
vcf-midatlantic wrote:
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