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Watch America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 2
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The Xerox Alto is described as the blueprint for modern personal computing, built with local networking capability, that directly inspired the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. The hosts frame it as the technology that took computing out of an elite industrial and scientific setting and into consumer-facing use, calling it the successor to "the mother of all demos."

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52:52local networking. They basically established the blueprint for modern personal computing. This is huge because it served as the direct technological inspiration for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. And it transformed computing from this elite industrial and scientific discipline to something that is consumerf facing. >> And it was the uh successor to the mother of all demos manifesting in the real world. Invention of Unix and C the 70s again were starting to get into a lot of these computing things. >> Yeah. Again, it's because now people are catching on. They're like, "Hey, computing is going to be everything." computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie. They developed Unix and

53:34rewrote its kernel in C programming language at Bell Labs and it established the modern paradigm for hardware independent portable software. Meaning I can write software now and then uh

From the episode
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    America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 2

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    America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 2

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