Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
Research Group developed Smalltalk.
This forerunner of Mac OS and MS
Windows was the first system with
overlapping windows and opaque popup
menus. In 1973, Alan Kay invented
the “office computer”, a forerunner of
the PC and Mac. Its design was based
on Smalltalk, with icons, graphics and a
mouse. Kay stated at a 1971 meeting at
PARC:
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future
is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything
that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" xli
In 1973, R. Metcalfe and researchers at Xerox PARC developed the experimental Alto
PC that incorporates a mouse, graphical user interface and Ethernet. Within the same
year, PARC’s Charles Simonyi developed Bravo text editor, the first “What You See Is
What You Get—type” (WYSIWYG) application. Metcalfe, later in the year, wrote a
memo describing Ethernet as a modified “Alohanet”, titled “Ether Acquisition”. By
1975, Metcalfe developed the first Ethernet local area network (LAN). By 1979, Xerox,
Intel and DEC had announced support for Ethernet. The Alto PC was officially
introduced in 1981 with a mouse, built-in Ethernet and Smalltalk. The commercial
version, available the same year, was named the Xerox Star and was the forst
commercially available workstation with a WYSIWYG desktop-type Graphical User
interface (GUI).
In 1964, Control Data Corp. introduced the CDC
6600 (left). It was designed by supercomputer guru
Seymour Cray, had 400,000 transistors and was
capable of 350,000 FLOPS. The 100 produced $7-
10 million machines had over 100 miles of electrical
wiring and a Freon refrigeration system to keep the
system’s electronics cool and were the world’s first
commercially successful supercomputer. The
machine was also the first to have an interactive
display the showed the graphical results of data, as it
was processed in real-time.
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