HackerTube.dev

Alto System Project: Larry Tesler demonstration of Gypsy

Computer History Museum · 30.9K views · 2019-03-11 · 52:41

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

On Hacker News

Referenced in discussions of early GUIs and Alto history as a rare first-hand demonstration by the creator.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computingTesting, debugging & developer tools
Search by tags
xerox altogypsylarry teslerxerox parctext editors

What people said

Rochus · 2021-06 · Recommendation

Bravo was modal, Gypsy was non-modal, Smalltalk-74 onwards had multi-windows (including pop-up menus) and a metaphorical desktop. I assume you know these interesting presentations: [VIDEO] , [LINK] EDIT: see also e.g. [LINK]

Read the original HN comment ↗
Someone · 2025-01 · Reference

In hindsight, yes, but I’m not sure it looked like it at the time. Surely, it took Apple years to start making ‘real’ money on selling Macs. They needed their Apple 2 line to pay the bills for years. Also, it wasn’t as much tech (bitmapped displays and computer mice existed elsewhere) as a vision that Apple took from Xerox, and they improved upon it/changed it quite a bit. Examples: - Alto’s GUI is verb-object, Mac is object-verb - Alto doesn’t have overlapping windows. - did Alto have cross-process copy-paste? - simplifying the mouse down to a single button may have been necessary to gain acceptance. (For comparison, look at [VIDEO] )

Read the original HN comment ↗
musicale · 2024-05 · Reference

> took inspiration from Xerox PARC Apple also took several people from Xerox PARC, including Larry Tesler (cut and paste, Object Pascal, Apple Lisa, Newton, etc.) who had demonstrated the Alto to Steve Jobs. In 2017 Tesler recorded a demo with the Computer History Museum on their restored Alto: [VIDEO] And of course Charles Simonyi went from PARC (Bravo) to Microsoft (Word).

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Computer History Museum, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources