PERQ
8th September 2024
Through a sequence of random events (seeing a note about an Alto emulator, listening to a truly atrocious podcast-retelling of the NeXT computer company) I found myself reading about the PERQ computer this evening.
Reader: the modern Mac is not “a copy of an Alto”. I mean it kinda is. But more recently than that, it’s really a copy of a PERQ.
The PERQ is an early, commercial, and technical-user-focused version of an Alto. Except not quite. It had the same fast CPU, large local memory and bitmapped display with fast microcoded rasterops (a so-called “3M machine” — 1 MIPS CPU, 1 megabyte RAM, 1 megapixel display, “and 1 megapenny of price”, about $10,000). It had the same GUI with overlapping windows. It also had Pascal, Fortran, C and Lisp. It also demoed and started taking orders in 1979 and shipped in 1980, before the competition, including before Xerox. The Xerox Star (Xerox did finally commercialize the Alto) and Apollo/Domain each shipped a year later, in 1981.