If you are interested in the history of personal computers, you surely have heard about Xerox Alto, but probably it was a long time ago that anybody played with one. It must have been long enough for Paul Allen as well so he decided to get a couple of units restored in the Living Computer Museum (www.livingcomputermuseum.org) he had founded in Seattle. Seattle is far away, all right, so Allen and his team created an almost faithful emulator so that you can experience the revolutionary user interface from home.

Before presenting the two restored units, Allen briefly presented the history of Alto, and its powerful effect on personal computers.

"It's one thing to read about a true breakthrough, something else to see it in action," he wrote.

Alto communicated with other computers via Ethernet (which was an innovation itself), and the restoration team made sure that communication worked, and it was not just the two units "talking" to each other. A three-megabit Ethernet bridge was also developed so that Alto would be able to communicate with today's computers. New PCs enabled to understand the crazy jargon of veterans…

An American tech company, Y Combinator significantly contributed to the revival of Alto, and documented the process in detail. Their work and collaboration with the museum aimed to create an online network for Altos. It will be a unique experience to play Maze War with somebody on another continent…

LCM has also released ContrAlto (www.livingcomputermuseum.org/Online-Systems/Press.aspx), which, as Allen says, "simulates the Alto at the microcode level, providing a very accurate simulation of the original computer". Though there already exists another emulator, Salto (toastytech.com/guis/salto.html), but even its developer admits that it is "kind of buggy" and incomplete.

Source: techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/living-computer-museum-restores-xerox-alto-and-debuts-new-emulator