An expensive office of the future
The Alto brought together a bitmap display, mouse, networking, email, graphical software, and what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing in one research system. The Computer History Museum notes that the first machine cost about $12,000 and that a commercial price might have approached $40,000, formidable numbers for personal computing in the 1970s.
Influence without a mass product
Thousands of Altos were built and many were placed with researchers, yet none were sold as Alto products. Its influence is clear, but the decision was not simply ‘see the future or miss it’: Xerox faced a costly system, an unformed market, and the separate challenge of turning laboratory integration into a supportable commercial machine.