Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
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Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#2My first impressions of it are that the portrait oriented monitor actually looks very stylish. There is something almost futuristic about it.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#3Total envy! There is an Alto in the Heinz-Nixdorf-Museum, but it is not functional.
Seeing one of these machines in action would be awesome. (Is there an emulator available?)
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#4This was a great system.
The more I research into Xerox's papers and manuals for Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar systems, the more I become convinced it was a big step back to the industry the adoption of inferior systems like UNIX.
Thankfully many traces of those ideas are now in Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS, Language Playgrounds and many IDE workflows.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#5My first impressions of it are that the portrait oriented monitor actually looks very stylish. There is something almost futuristic about it.
These days, some displays allow you to rotate them between landscape and portrait orientiation.
At work, I have a 24 inch TFT in portait mode which I use mostly for coding (and other tasks where vertical space is valuable). It is very nice, because e.g. in text processing, a whole page fits the screen nicely.
In a way, we have that with tablets and phones, too.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#6Total envy! There is an Alto in the Heinz-Nixdorf-Museum, but it is not functional. Seeing one of these machines in action would be awesome. (Is there an emulator available?)
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has a running Alto, but I haven't seen it. I've used the Salto emulator: https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#7Total envy! There is an Alto in the Heinz-Nixdorf-Museum, but it is not functional. Seeing one of these machines in action would be awesome. (Is there an emulator available?)
This emulator looks interesting: http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#8Total envy! There is an Alto in the Heinz-Nixdorf-Museum, but it is not functional. Seeing one of these machines in action would be awesome. (Is there an emulator available?)
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has a running Alto, but I haven't seen it. I've used the Salto emulator: https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator
I have seen it, and used BravoX on it. I even gave a demo to standers by once I figured it out. Its a very interesting system, one that is clearly not too removed from a modern word processor.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#9My first impressions of it are that the portrait oriented monitor actually looks very stylish. There is something almost futuristic about it.
These days, some displays allow you to rotate them between landscape and portrait orientiation. At work, I have a 24 inch TFT in portait mode which I use mostly for coding (and other tasks where vertical space is valuable). It is very nice, because e.g. in text processing, a whole page fits the screen nicely. In a way, we have that with tablets and phones, too.
Operating systems and drivers will allow rotation of most monitors and it mainly comes down to a matter of mounting hardware if autorotation isn't a big deal. Monoprice has a stand for about $20.
http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=108&cp_id=10828&cs_id=...
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#10My first impressions of it are that the portrait oriented monitor actually looks very stylish. There is something almost futuristic about it.
Those CRT Monitors are probably the weakest part of the system in terms of durability.