Xerox Alto Emulator

The emulator needs a host display greater than 800 pixels high to fit the altos 606808 display.

Xerox alto emulator. 7 8 the first machines were introduced on 1 march 1973 9 a decade before mass market gui machines became available. Altogether currently simulates the alto cpu and video display though the display is not quite correct. When using this page your mouse and keyboard are being used by the emulator so your normal keyboard shortcuts will probably not work. This article describes how to set up the contralto simulator explains where to find alto disk images and shows some of the programs you can run on it.

Altogether is a microcode level simulator for the xerox alto personal workstation. The alto introduced several experimental concepts including the graphical user interface object oriented programming and ethernet networking. An in progress emulator of the xerox alto workstation. If you want to try out the altos software the easiest approach is the contralto simulator.

I built an ethernet emulator using a beaglebone black allowing me to send ethernet boot packets to the alto. Contralto is a software program that simulates the original alto hardware and allows original alto software to be run on modern pcs. The xerox alto was the first system with ethernet introducing a lot of networking innovations. The xerox alto is the first computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface gui later using the desktop metaphor.

Thats why the team has also developed a complete alto emulator. The disk code is incomplete. Again this is similar to running graphical applications under dos. Contraltojs xerox alto emulator dont be alarmed.

Contralto is an application for modern pcs that simulates the original xerox alto from the graphical display to the ethernet interface. See the related work section below for more details. The alto is a single tasking environment and applications take complete control of the system and the screen when you run them. The revolutionary xerox alto computer came out in 1973 and set the direction for personal computing.