Hackaday Links: March 5, 2023
Well, we guess it had to happen eventually — Ford is putting plans in place to make its vehicles capable of self-repossession. At least it seems so from a patent …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: March 5, 2023
Category Archives: parc
The Origin of Cut, Copy, and Paste
I’m always fascinated that someone designed just about everything you use, no matter how trivial it is. The keyboard you type on, the light switch you turn on, even the faucet handle. They don’t just spontaneously grow on trees, so …read more
Making a Little Smalltalk
While things like object oriented computing and model-view-controller are old hat these days, when Smalltalk burst on the scene, many people had never heard of these new ideas. While the little language with roots at Xerox and based on Simula never caught fire, it was very influential in a number …read more
William English, Computer Mouse Co-Creator, Has Passed
We are saddened to report that William English, co-inventor of the computer mouse, died July 26 in San Rafael, California. He was 91 years old.
Every piece of technology starts with a vision, a vague notion of how a thing could or should be. The computer mouse is no different. …read more
Continue reading William English, Computer Mouse Co-Creator, Has Passed
The Xerox Star On A Desktop Near You
It is 1980-something and you see someone typing on a keyboard. The display is graphical, and they use a mouse to finish a document, send it over the network to another similar computer, where another user edits it a bit and prints it on a laser printer. Given the time-frame you might think the computer is a Mac, but you’d be wrong. The Xerox Star had all the features Apple “invented” about three years before the Macintosh arrived. If you never heard of the Star, that’s not surprising. At $16,500 each, there were only about 25,000 sold. Your chances of …read more
The Incredibly Technical History of Digital Rights Management
DRM, one of the internet’s dark arts, was already in the works—complete with epic patents—years before the existence of Napster gave it a business case. Continue reading The Incredibly Technical History of Digital Rights Management
Restoring The Groundbreaking Xerox Alto
The Xerox Alto was a minicomputer that had a lot of firsts to its name: first GUI, first Ethernet connection, and first computer to use a laser printer. This is the computer that inspired Steve Jobs to build the Lisa. And this was built all back in 1973! So when [Ken Shirriff] and a team of other old-computer aficionados got their hands on one, you know they’d get to work.
[Ken]’s blog describes the start of what’s sure to be a long journey. It mostly describes the Alto system and locates its place in computer history, but there are some …read more
