zlacker

It's interesting that from the perspective of today the Alto looks limited, but at the time it was built it was basically a look at what powerful hardware might be like in 10-15 years (so mid 80s - which was pretty close in terms of a Lisa). So the equivalent would be trying to imagine what an individual's computing power would be like in 2035, and building a system to that.

For example, about half the memory of the Alto was just used for the bitmap display, which makes the system even more remarkable for what it could achieve with an economy of code. From what I've read, they had a plan to design a new system in the mid-70s (that would again look 15 yrs into the future) but at that point they got enough pushback from Xerox that they were not able to get the funding for that.