The Xerox Alto is the precursor of today's PC. Developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research center in 1972, the Alto had a bitmap screen display, windows, drop-down menu bars, built-in Ethernet and hard disk, a mouse, two keyboards, a software productivity suite with a word processor, a paint program, and even email.

But Xerox was waging the copier and patent war, and the Alto went nowhere. Employees moved on to Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, taking the Alto know-how with them. Twelve years later, the Alto's technology, especially the GUI, was stolen by Steve Jobs and reborn in the Apple Lisa (see below) and most importantly the Macintosh. So despite the Alto being a brilliant piece of engineering, it has to be judged in historical perspective as a failure because Xerox foolishly didn't capitalized on its innovation.