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

by Michael A. Hiltzik

Linked by Ethernet to each other, to printers, and to a host of other devices such as video displays and organ keyboards, the Altos lit PARC’s creative fuse. Thacker had designed the first custom application, a program called “SIL” (for “Simple Illustrator”) that automated the process of laying out computer circuits and allowed schematics to be translated directly into printed boards. But scores more were right behind. There were “Draw” by Patrick Beaudelaire and “Markup” by William Newman, which picked up where Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” left off by giving users the power to place freehand drawings directly onto the bitmapped screen. (Of course, where Sutherland’s program worked only on the lone TX—2 at MIT, these would run on any Alto.) There were programs to compose music and animation, to format text documents, and to assist the writing of more programs, and dozens of programs in Smalltalk.