Tales of Silicon Valley: The Grandfather of the GUI

>> Silicon Valley is full of stories, some pretty, some not. This is one of those stories. [ gunfire ] Bruce Damer, curator of the DigiBarn shows the Xerox computer that everyone else stole their ideas from. >> This is the Xerox Alto and this is the souped up version with 256k in it. But it's basically the birth of the modern, networked, personal computer experience with Windows and icons, a mouse, actually almost like a game controller but this is also like a 2 handed controller, it had connected to the Ethernet via these nifty connectors, 3 megabit or 10 megabit and so the Windows and icons, email services, putting a document on the screen and printing it on a printer on the network, composing music, and the Alto interface kind of look like this. You can see these overlapping windows and this is an article from 1977 and it's talking about Windows in quotes, their display frames. You can drag them around and size them and compose documents and programs in the Windows so this is where it all started. >> Look for more tales of Silicon Valley at CNET TV dot com.