Alto System Project: Larry Tesler demonstration of Gypsy
Computer History Museum1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2021–2025
demo · intermediate · evergreen · 2021–2025 on HN
Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.
Referenced in discussions of early GUIs and Alto history as a rare first-hand demonstration by the creator.
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4 comments from Hacker News
Bravo was modal, Gypsy was non-modal, Smalltalk-74 onwards had multi-windows (including pop-up menus) and a metaphorical desktop. I assume you know these interesting presentations: ▶ this video , link EDIT: see also e.g. link
In hindsight, yes, but I’m not sure it looked like it at the time. Surely, it took Apple years to start making ‘real’ money on selling Macs. They needed their Apple 2 line to pay the bills for years. Also, it wasn’t as much tech (bitmapped displays and computer mice existed elsewhere) as a vision that Apple took from Xerox, and they improved upon it/changed it quite a bit. Examples: - Alto’s GUI is verb-object, Mac is object-verb - Alto doesn’t have overlapping windows. - did Alto have cross-process copy-paste? - simplifying the mouse down to a single button may have been necessary to gain acceptance. (For comparison, look at ▶ this video )
> took inspiration from Xerox PARC Apple also took several people from Xerox PARC, including Larry Tesler (cut and paste, Object Pascal, Apple Lisa, Newton, etc.) who had demonstrated the Alto to Steve Jobs. In 2017 Tesler recorded a demo with the Computer History Museum on their restored Alto: ▶ this video And of course Charles Simonyi went from PARC (Bravo) to Microsoft (Word).
The “natural” background for text is light though. Hard to find books, newspapers, or magazines that put a dark background behind text of any significant length. Accordingly, the Xerox Alto had a light background too, back in the 1970s. Demonstrated here with Smalltalk: link And here with a GUI based text editor: ▶ this video