Speaking of 1983, if you want to see why they failed, look at what they put into the PC market instead of the Star and Alto: The Xerox 820 [0], an expensive, un

Speaking of 1983, if you want to see why they failed, look at what they put into the PC market instead of the Star and Alto: The Xerox 820 [0], an expensive, uninspired knockoff CP/M machine that was positioned to beat the IBM PC and promptly fell on its face. I actually just got another 820-II this week -- I had one when I was a kid, handed down from my grandpa who got it at a bargain basement price. The thing that endears it to me 40 years after release is how needlessly MASSIVE it is: The keyboard alone is the size of a few of the binders of manuals that shipped with it, but it's almost completely hollow; and for storage, I have a separate enclosure with a combination 8" (!) floppy drive and 8MB hard disk, its own power supply, and a half-inch-thick data cable. (There was a much more reasonable dual 5.25" drive enclosure, but the "big iron" is what I grew up with.) PARC was really a completely different world from the rest of Xerox. Maybe they should have let more people come tour and shamelessly steal their ideas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820