Whatever Happened To The Computer Of Tomorrow, Anyway? The Xerox Alto Story

August 9, 2026 by Tyler August 42 Comments

You’ve almost certainly heard of the Xerox Alto, the machine that pioneered the desktop-mouse-keyboard interface and inspired Steve Jobs to produce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. It wasn’t just having a desktop, though– so much of our modern computing paradigm was invented on these machines. Given that, why aren’t we all using Xerox clones instead of Apples or PCs descended from the IBM compatibles? [Ctrl+Alt+Fail] has a video that answers the question: whatever happened to the computer of tomorrow, anyway?

It goes through the whole story of the Alto, from its introduction at Xerox PARC in the 1970s to its demise. At the introduction, the engineers showed of the What You See Is What You Get word processor, networked the machines together to show off e-mail and that anyone could use the office laser printer. It all seems very familiar now, but at the time, it was a revolution. An expensive one. The monitor sitting on the desk wasn’t the computer, after all: that was a large filing-cabinet sized desk sitting underneath. Only about 2000 were ever built, so what happened?

It wasn’t just that the first units cost twelve grand USD to build in 1973 money– about 90 large today by CPI, or for the gold bugs that’s 96 oz or 2.7 kg. It wasn’t worth its weight in gold, but it was close. Still, that wasn’t the problem: later models would be cheaper. The problem was that Xerox refused to sell the thing in the 70s. They saw the potential of a paperless office, and it scared them. Sure, they could sell a computer, once. They wouldn’t get a monthly service fee, nor the cost of the toner, drums and other consumables the Alto wouldn’t need. So they sat on it, and let others like Steve Jobs who didn’t have an existing business empire to lose take their ideas and run with them.

It seems shortsighted, but Xerox had already lost millions on big iron computing around the same time the Alto came along, and every business decision after that was carefully weighed on its projected revenue. Compared to a copier that printed money for Xerox as surely as it printed paper, the Alto just didn’t look like it could pay for itself. It looked likely to lose them a lot of money, which, in fact the adoption of the personal computer ultimately did. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback and say these developments were inevitable and Xerox should have run out in front, but [Ctrl+Alt+Fail] does a good job of explaining the logic from the Xerox boards’ point of view, which makes the video very much worth a watch.

If you can’t get enough Alto, we can also point you to what it takes to restore one, what almost killed one, and why you shouldn’t mine bitcoin with one.

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The Bit79 Was A Famicom Clone That Took The “Family Computer” Name Seriously

July 6, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

While the original name of what much of the world knows as the NES was the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, it was very rarely used as a family computer. Sure, there was a basic cartridge and an add-on keyboard sold in Japan, but it was always a sideshow to the games.

Nintendo recognized that when they brought their Entertainment System overseas. Most of the various famiclones — which date back to the mid-80s — are the same. BIT in Taiwan had a different idea: their Bit 79 would be a full home computer. Picture a C=64 that plays Nintendo games, and you might not be too far off. [Inkbox] tells the full story in his latest YouTube video, and it’s a must-watch for anyone interested in the history of 8-bit machines that are totally unknown in the West.

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Breaking Enigma With An FPGA, Just Like At Bletchley Park

May 30, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

The pioneering work done by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park in England was perhaps as important in the history of technology as it was the history of the war. Given the last 80-odd years of technological development, their revolutionary work should be within the realms of a student project — which it was, specifically in ECE 5760 at Cornell University. The work was done by [Erica Jiang], [Kelvin Resch], and [Isabella Frank].

Nowadays if someone told you there was a code to be broken, you wouldn’t be reaching for electromechanical devices, but you just might think of trying an FPGA. After all, the programmable gate arrays allow for much faster execution of fixed logic than software running on a traditional CPU. That won’t help much with modern RSA schemes, and for Enigma, it’s massively overkill, but doing it that way was a great learning opportunity for the students.

Their project emulates the whole Bletchley Park cryptography apparatus, not just the Bombe Machine, and if you’re interested in learning about this piece of history you could absolutely do worse than to examine their documentation. If you’re into video, you can check out the final presentation and demo video below. Meanwhile if you’re wondering what the opposition was up to, we have good explainer of the enigma machine here.

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Virtual Museum Hosts Every OS You Haven’t Heard Of

May 28, 2026 by Tyler August 12 Comments

OK, every operating system is a bit of a stretch — Windows Vista notably didn’t make the cut — but [Andrew]’s Virtual OS museum has a good claim to being the most comprehensive archive of operating systems yet assembled.

[Andrew] has a blog post describing the project, as well as a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below. But the real fun is in the downloading and spinning up one of 570+ operating systems for more than 250 platforms on pre-configured virtual machines that have been packaged up for us.

This isn’t just the usual retrocomputer nostalgia-fest of Macintosh System and DOSBox. There’s everything from IBM Big Iron and VAXen to Texas Instrument graphing calculators emulated in the museum, with software to run on them, too. If you’ve ever wondered what you could do with the Manchester Baby, well, all known software for that machine is included with its ‘operating system’.

Admission is free, but like any good museum you’ll be waiting in line a while to get in, so expect the full 128 GB download to take some time. If you’re into computer history, though, it’s going to very much be worth the wait. If you try it and like it, you could help others by seeding the torrent.

The actual museum launches in a VM as a modern Linux system — perhaps that can be considered an exhibit itself — with a launcher to select any of the other system/OS combos, including various other, older Linuxes hosted on their own VMs. There are more to come, too, as [Andrew] continues the long debugging process of making sure everything works as expected.

Purists may decry this virtual emulation as not being quite the real thing, which is true. But while MiSTer supports a lot of cores via FPGA, you probably won’t find everything here on that platform. We have, however, seen an FPGA recreation of the Manchester Baby. More than once, even.

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A prototype VLIW computer made by Multiflow

A History On The “Impossible” VLIW Computing

April 7, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 14 Comments

A computer does one thing at a time, even if it feels like it’s doing multiple things at once. In reality, it’s just switching between tasks very quickly. But a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) computer is different. Today, [Asianometry] tells us about VLIW computing and its history.

Processors have multiple functional units; for example, you might have separate units each for addition, multiplication and division. But because it runs one instruction at a time, these units tend to spend a large amount of time idle. VLIW aims to address this inefficiency by reinventing what an instruction means. Instead of telling the whole processor what to do, a VLIW instruction tells each functional unit what to do at once. Sounds good, right? Well, that was the easy part.

The hard part? How to compile a program for a VLIW computer, that can actually make use of all the functional units at once; after all, the efficiency promise is that the higher activity makes up for larger instruction words to fetch. That is the compiler’s job; VLIW compilers try to reschedule the operations in the program to convert sequential code into more parallel operations then compiled into the titular very long instruction words.

[Asianometry] goes into detail about this, the history, and more in the video after the break.
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Crazy Old Machines

January 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 44 Comments

Al and I were talking about the IBM 9020 FAA Air Traffic Control computer system on the podcast. It’s a strange machine, made up of a bunch of IBM System 360 mainframes connected together to a common memory unit, with all sorts of custom peripherals to support keeping track of airplanes in the sky. Absolutely go read the in-depth article on that machine if it sparks your curiosity.

It got me thinking about how strange computers were in the early days, and how boringly similar they’ve all become. Just looking at the word sizes of old machines is a great example. Over the last, say, 40 years, things that do computing have had 4, 8, 16, 32, or even 64-bit words. You noticed the powers-of-two trend going on here, right? Basically starting with the lowly Intel 4004, it’s been round numbers ever since.

On the other side of the timeline, though, you get strange beasts. The classic PDP-8 had 12-bit words, while its predecessors the PDP-6 and PDP-1 had 36 bits and 18 bits respectively. (Factors of six?) There’s a string of military guidance computers that had 27-bit words, while the Apollo Guidance computer ran 15-bit words. UNIVAC III had 25-bit words, putting the 23-bit Harvard Mark I to shame.

I wasn’t there, but it gives you the feeling that each computer is a unique, almost hand-crafted machine. Some must have made their odd architectural choices to suit particular functions, others because some designer had a clever idea. I’m not a computer historian, but I’m sure that the word lengths must tell a number of interesting stories.

On the whole, though, it gives the impression of a time when each computer was it’s own unique machine, before the convergence of everything to roughly the same architectural ideas. A much more hackery time, for lack of a better word. We still see echoes of this in the people who make their own “retro” computers these days, either virtually, on a breadboard, or emulated in the fabric of an FPGA. It’s not just nostalgia, though, but a return to a time when there was more creative freedom: a time before 64 bits took over.

A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet

December 15, 2025 by Al Williams 66 Comments

We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But there were still spreadsheets. How far back do they go? Continue reading “A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet” →