Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

by Michael A. Hiltzik

But once Kay finally got all his machines retrofitted with adequate memory, Smalltalk fulfilled all its developers’ expectations. While the CSL engineers busied themselves with programs to format the same dull text-heavy documents as fast as they could make the Altos run, the lunatic fringe worked the machines’ graphical capabilities to the bone. A typical Learning Research Group program was no blob of black-on-white text but a carnival of drawings, half-tone photographs, even animated pictures. “Objects mean multimedia documents,” Kay would say. “You almost get them for free.” As a result, the group’s programs tended to favor the artist over the scientist. An LRG engineer named Bob Shur had programmed, with Thacker’s help, a musical synthesizer capability into the Alto that allowed the machine to output twelve real-time voices at once, an astonishing capability for a machine of the Alto’s scale.