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wished to employ. The work being done there also attracted the
ubiquitous Stewart Brand, who came to hang out, and to write about
what he saw there for his prescient
Rolling Stone article, which
predicted the advent of the personal computer. In return Brand's
approach informed the work at PARC. In an article about Brand in
Fortune magazine, Alan Kay remarked that The Whole Earth Catalog
was the first topic PARC owned and that it was a symbol of what
they were trying to achieve. This, combined with the Mansfield
Amendment and the presence of Taylor at XeroxPARC, meant that
many talented computer scientists and researchers who had been
ARPA-funded were now drawn to the Centre. Among them was Kay,
who had worked with Ivan Sutherland, developer of Sketchpad, at
the University of Utah, and who had witnessed Douglas Engelbart's
famous Augmented Knowledge Workshop in
1972
. The work of
Kay and others at PARC was informed by its set-up and circum-
stances, as well as by Seymour Papert's experiments with children
and computers at MIT, which had been influenced by the struc-
turalist cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget. In particular those at
PARC developed new, intuitive methods of interacting with the
computer, by conjoining Sutherland's advances in visual computing
and Engelbart's developments in making the computer more 'user-
friendly' with developments in areas such as bit-mapped graphics.
The eventual result was the 'Alto', a new kind of computer, which,
through the use of windows, a mouse, and a graphic interface, could
be, at least in theory, used intuitively and easily by anyone. For a
number of reasons to do with economics and perception of appro-
priate markets, Xerox marketed the Alto, and a later version of their
ideas, the 'Star', as business machines and priced them accordingly.
Though the ideas the machines manifested were greeted favourably,
the inept marketing meant that they did not succeed. 24
At the same time the computer world had developed its own
kind of counter-culture, known as 'hacking'. Hacking developed in
computer laboratories at MIT, then at Stanford, to which students
1968
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