(Although it looks like the common "desktop layout" screenshots that I'd always associated with the Alto are actually the SmallTalk environment running on the Alto.)
We had some of these at the National Bureau of Standards, where I interned. Someone had to give up an office, for the laser printer.
There were some games on the disks we got from PARC, among them a BreakOut clone written in SmallTalk. You could break into the SM interpreter, get a listener, and start hacking away. I think the BYTE issue on Smalltalk had just come out; we were Very Happy until the Altos went away.
I still have my RK05 disk pack. Nothing to mount it on now except a wall. :-/
I had a working Xerox 860 in my parents attic when I was in high school. The one with the weird round touchpad on the keyboard.
The school I went to got it as a donation and didn't know what to do with it so I adopted it.
I finally got rid of it when multiple 'experts' that I knew convinced me that it was completely worthless. For a long time, its giant wheeled case housed my dual pentium pro motherboard that was too big to fit into a standard ATX case.
I remember using the Altos at PARC during a visit in '73 or so, then using the MIT-LCS pool (actually not that busy) during the late '70s.
The Lisp Machines we had in the EECS computing pool (which I was managing along with our own DECsystem-20) were much cooler even then so the Altos never caught my fancy... :-)
I'd love to see someone win this auction and donate it to the Computer History Museum, does anyone know if they have one already? http://www.computerhistory.org/
all we need is the opposite of ebay, people teaming their money to acquire something for the commons, so that all these expensive historical products noone in their right mind would buy wind up in the same place that we can send schoolkids to as punishment.
The Altos were not official, supported products, but R&D projects and prototypes. I heard several were given away. The "real" products were the Star series.
Those didn't succeed because they were far too expensive. As were the Altos, BTW. A working system could easily run into the US$ 100K range, with workstation and printer.
A couple years later, Apple made the same mistake with the Lisa, pricing it over US$ 10K. They only got something with the US$ 2K-range Macintoshes. And those really caught on when Apple launched their laser printer.
Because Xerox considered they could never make a product out of PARC's output (Apple and Microsoft disagreed). None of it ever became actual products, it was either research material or stuff for some unis.
Also, maybe price. This was in the late 70s to early 80s, the hardware in the box was significant, the rest of the world was still running on 80x25 text displays if that.
(Although it looks like the common "desktop layout" screenshots that I'd always associated with the Alto are actually the SmallTalk environment running on the Alto.)