Xerox Alto

In 1970, the photocopier company Xerox founded a research centre in Palo Alto known as PARC. This is where the Xerox Alto was developed, a forerunner of much of the PC technology taken for granted today.
The Alto had a graphical user interface and a mouse, and was the model on which first the Macintosh, then Windows were based. It was also fully network-capable: the Ethernet was another Xerox PARC invention.
Many Alto system engineers later worked on the Apple Macintosh. Only around 1,000 examples of the Alto were built; it was a prototype and was never launched on the market. Photo: Jan Braun, HNF