Smooth Operators

Posted at: Tuesday 13th July 2004 by Ben Hardwidge

In the early 1970s a group of scruffy computer bums sank into their beanbags at Xerox PARC and devised an OS with bit-mapped graphics, scrollbars and pop-up menus. Sound familiar? Ben Hardwidge finds out where Windows first started

Hang on, isn't Xerox the photocopier company?
Kay and his team completed the first version of Smalltalk in 1971, and it was one of the major projects to come out of Xerox PARC. But what exactly was PARC? It's not an easy question to answer, but the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was basically a research lab set up by Xerox in Silicon Valley in California, USA. Its aim was to find out where technology was heading in the future - Xerox had realised early on that computers were going to be big, and it wanted a piece of the action.

Of course, Xerox isn't a name you usually associate with computers. It's one of those big, serious business names that normally go with brochures featuring the word 'solutions' in every other sentence, and photos of businessmen in smart suits doing their photocopying on big, serious photocopiers. What exactly was Xerox doing inventing the personal computer?

Well, in truth, Xerox didn't want to produce personal computers, it just wanted to know where they would fit into a future business strategy. Alan Kay once famously said that 'the best way to predict the future is to invent it', and that's exactly what the philosophy behind PARC was. Xerox certainly dabbled in the computer market for a bit, but that was never the idea. The idea was to predict the computer world in ten years time and build it - that way Xerox could prepare its printing and business products in advance.

Any rational person would think this was ambitious beyond belief, but PARC got it pretty much spot on. It was only the 1970s, but somehow the guys at PARC not only managed to devise the GUI that inspired Windows and Mac OS, but also invented the laser printer, predicted the advent of the laptop, and developed forms of email, networking and even a kind of Internet-esque network called ARPANET.

Dave Robson (the only member of the 1970s PARC team who still works for Xerox) says that most of it was based on extrapolation: 'All you had to do was believe Moore's law with regard to the direction the size and cost of components were headed in. If you put your faith in this, then Kay's prediction of the laptop or Dynabook is relatively straightforward. He assumed the laptop would show up, and he had to work on the software to make it usable. The idea was to simulate as much as we could, and we got it right-on - the network, the GUI, the computers, everything.'

PCs and playstations
And the key phrase here is 'the software to make it usable'. Computers were very far from usable at this time, and Kay wanted to produce an operating system that anybody, including children, could fathom. As Kay put it in 1993: 'We wanted to build playstations instead of workstations', and everybody would be able to afford them too. He also objected to the operating systems of the day, which were misleadingly given powerful names such as Thor and Zeus, but actually couldn't do much more than a pocket calculator. So, with all these factors in mind, the concept for Smalltalk - the friendly OS with the friendly name - was born.