Alto System Project: Larry Tesler demonstration of Gypsy

Computer History Museum
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2025
YouTube
31K views · 7 years ago · demo · intermediate · historical

Larry Tesler demonstrates Gypsy, the non-modal document editor built at Xerox PARC, running on a restored Xerox Alto at the Computer History Museum. It shows text editing with a mouse, selection and cut and paste as they worked in the 1970s.

HN offers it as a first-hand look at early GUI text editing and a reference point for how the Alto's interface differed from the later Mac.

“In 2017 Tesler recorded a demo with the Computer History Museum on their restored Alto”
GUI historyHCI pioneers & visionary demos
#xeroxalto#gypsy#larrytesler#textediting#guihistory#cutandpaste

6 comments from Hacker News

n
@nequo2023 · in “Demonstrating GUI text editing on the 1970s Xerox Alto (2017) [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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R
@Rochus2021 · in “Building the First GUIs”
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
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t
@tambourine_man2019 · in “Alto System Project: Larry Tesler Demonstration of Gypsy”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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S
@Someone2025 · in “Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)”
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)
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m
@musicale2024 · in “Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan (12 July 1981) [pdf]”
> 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).
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n
@nequo2023 · in “No_color”
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
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