I've read and enjoyed Dealers of Lightning. However, I feel compelled to note that Alan Kay did an AMA here in 2016 [1], and said [2]:<p><i>"Dealers of Lightning" is not the best book to read (try Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine").</i><p>I've not yet read Waldrop's book. It's on my to-read shelf.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756</a>
"The second round of Alto 3, with a plan to manufacture entirely from commercial components, was canned in favor of the Xerox Star – a scope-crept project which included an OS and hardware, later only the OS with matching hardware."<p>The Star was essentially the Dandelion which was PARC's own affordable successor to the Alto - a similar soft machine but implemented with then-commodity AMD2900 bit-slice. As far as I know, the Altos were all manufactured entirely from commercial components (7400 TTL mostly). To really commercialize would require a formal PCB design rather than wirewrap and perhaps a more designed enclosure.