Xerox Alto

A Xerox Alto on display at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany: the tall portrait-shaped screen, the keyboard, the small mouse to the right and the processor cabinet underneath. Introduced at Xerox PARC in 1974, the Alto ran a graphical interface of windows, icons and a mouse, linked to other machines over a network and printed to laser printers. It was a research machine rather than a mass-market product, yet nearly everything on a modern desktop was working here first, and it shaped Apple's Lisa and Macintosh.