Very interesting retrospective on the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer. It is fascinating to see so much good ideas were first invented at a printer manufacturer’s research lab.

I knew the mouse was invented there, but seeing they also came up with modern WYSIWYG word processing, Smalltalk, and the desktop metaphor, is crazy cool. Here’s a web-based Xerox Alto emulator, based on the cheekily-named ContrAlto.