Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Xerox's Alto paired a bitmap screen with a mouse, overlapping windows and a local network connection. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

The first graphical interface appeared in 1973

Xerox's Alto paired a bitmap screen with a mouse, overlapping windows and a local network connection The Alto was built at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as a research machine rather than a product, and about 1,500 were made. It introduced the desktop metaphor, icons and a mouse pointer to everyday computing, and the same lab produced the laser printer and Ethernet. Apple engineers saw the Alto in 1979, and the ideas reached shops through the Macintosh in 1984. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Computer History Museum

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Tags: interfaces, xerox, computing-history

The first graphical interface appeared in 1973: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Xerox's Alto paired a bitmap screen with a mouse, overlapping windows and a local network connection. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.