The genesis of the workstation idea came from the Xerox Corporation's research center located in Palo Alto, California. In 1973 they developed a machine for internal use, though intended eventually to be marketed, called the Alto. The Alto's graphics-oriented screen and use of a desktop metaphor for operations executed by the comptuer would later appear on the Macintosh. But unlike Macintosh and other personal computers of the 1980s, the Alto was desigend to be connected to a network. That concept, of distributed processing through a local-area network, reversed the then-prevalent notion of "computer utility": a large number of essentially "dumb" terminals being served on a time-shared basis by a large, centrally-located mainframe. With the Alto, the network itself became part of the computer's architecture.
One of the central figures behind the Alto was Douglas
Engelbart, who in the 1950s worked at the Stanford Research
Institute on ways in which computers might be used to "augment
human intellect" in his words. With funds from military agencies
of the U.S. government, Engelbart and his colleagues sought to
ease communication between computer users and their machines.
They introduced individual computer monitors which could be
modified both by typing in text and by moving an electronicpointer, which they named a "mouse".
When the U.S. reduced defense spending toward the end of the Vietnam War, funds for Engelbart's laboratory were sharply curtailed. Several of his colleagues went to work nearby at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), an institution funded by Xerox Corporation. Influenced by Engelbart's ideas and by developments in interactive computing elsewhere, a small group of engineers at PARC developed the ALTO. Each ALTO was designed for a single user, and contained a keyboard, a video monitor, and a processing unit that fit under a desk. The ALTO monitor featured a high-resolution screen split into several sections or windows, with a menu of computer commands. To select a command from the menu, users moved the mouse to position a pointer over the desired item, and then pressed a button.
A networking system called Ethernet allowed the ALTOs to be linked togetaher. Networking had been known since the 1960s, the time of the massive SAGE system used for air defense. SAGE required a large and unwieldy central computer to control the network, and it was never a practical system. Ethernet distributed the communications tasks among the workstations connected to it. No large central control was needed. By 1979, nearly 1000 ALTOs were in use, mainly within Xerox Corporation. The company introduced a commercial version of the machine, called the Star 8010, in 1981. However, at $16,000 per machine,this proved too expensive for most users.
Sources: Anonymous (1986), Johnson et al (1989), Sieworek.
Rev. 11/20/95