Technology History | 3333 Coyote Hill Road — Hundreds Were Built and None Were Sold

Xerox opened this research centre in 1970, and by the spring of 1973 the machine it is remembered for was running.

The Alto put its screen on end like a sheet of paper, 606 by 808 pixels of bitmap, and gave it a three-button mouse and a removable disc cartridge holding 2.5 megabytes.

Butler Lampson had asked for it in a memo of December 1972 headed "Why Alto?", proposing ten to thirty units.

On 22 May 1973 Robert Metcalfe typed a memo in this building describing an ether network, the scheme that let those machines share one cable and detect each other's collisions on it.

Metcalfe and David Boggs published the design in Communications of the ACM in July 1976, the patent issued in December 1977 with Charles Thacker and Lampson added as inventors, and the standard became IEEE 802.3 in 1983.

Hundreds of Altos were built. They spread through this centre, through Xerox, out to a few universities and as far as the White House, and none of them was ever offered for sale.

Laser printing is usually filed here too, and the filing is slightly off. Gary Starkweather built his first version at Xerox's research centre in Webster, New York, and was moved to Palo Alto in 1971 because his own division would not back the idea.

A working prototype followed in 1972 and the product in 1977, which is a decade between the invention and the invoice.

The commercial answer to the Alto came in 1981 as the Xerox 8010 Star, at over sixteen thousand dollars for a workstation and up to a hundred thousand for an office fitted out with them. It did not sell either.

Metcalfe had already gone, leaving in 1979 to found 3Com and sell the network instead of the machine.

The building in the photograph is the one the memos were written in, a terraced concrete complex cut into Coyote Hill. PARC has been run by SRI International since 2023.

Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons