Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
I know it&#x27;s not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.righto.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.righto.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto...</a> . It says<p>&gt; The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox&#x27;s ideas, making the GUI available to the mass market.<p>The reference is &quot; Malcolm Gladwell describes Steve Jobs&#x27; visit to Xerox in detail in Creation Myth.&quot;<p>But quoting <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.stanford.edu&#x2F;dept&#x2F;SUL&#x2F;sites&#x2F;mac&#x2F;parc.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.stanford.edu&#x2F;dept&#x2F;SUL&#x2F;sites&#x2F;mac&#x2F;parc.html</a> :<p>&gt; The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. ... It&#x27;s a good story. Unfortunately, it&#x27;s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong.  ...<p>&gt; Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the 1979 visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh (a collection of essays, technical specs, and brainstorms written by Jef Raskin on and others) dating from the fall of 1979-- months before the PARC visit-- show that the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. ...<p>&gt; Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two.