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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

#41

Post by kabdib »

We had some Altos (and a laser printer) at the Bureau of Standards, when I interned there in the late 1970s and early 80s. They had a number of games; one of them was written in SmallTalk, which you could break into, and then muck around in. Some screenshots from BYTE and a few papers gave us syntax hints, and we were off.

At one point we had some questions about SmallTalk-76 and called up Xerox PARC. Managed to get hold of Adele Goldberg, who answered our questions but was not terribly amused. I think Alan Kay would have been friendlier to us kids :-)

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#42

Post by progman »

progman wrote: post #28

There is a lot of documentation about the Alto. Are there also complete circuit diagrams? I am just curious because the processor was made in TTL at a time before the 6502 and Z80 were born. Sooner or later the last functional Xerox Alto will cease to work (sadly). In that case it could make sense to replace the dysfunctional parts with modern retro circuits. I wonder if a project to build a functional Alto clone (wi…

Thanks to all the posters here for their answers and recommendations!

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#43

Post by ScottBurson »

dang wrote: post #27

We've all been fans of Ken's blog for years, so were thrilled that he took an interest in this project. Not only is Ken doing these amazing writeups, he gathered together the master restorers and engineers, some of whom worked on Altos at the time, who are now working on this one. Seeing them set to it, inspecting the Alto and figuring out what would be needed, was a lesson in self-organization. It was an honor to wa…

I have a Symbolics XL-1200 that I've been wondering what to do with. Would YC like it? It worked the last time I turned it on, but that was 4 or 5 years ago, probably.

It's like triple-pizza-box size, not a refrigerator nor even the size of the Alto.

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#44

Post by Aloha »

kens wrote: post #33
progman wrote: post #28

There is a lot of documentation about the Alto. Are there also complete circuit diagrams? I am just curious because the processor was made in TTL at a time before the 6502 and Z80 were born. Sooner or later the last functional Xerox Alto will cease to work (sadly). In that case it could make sense to replace the dysfunctional parts with modern retro circuits. I wonder if a project to build a functional Alto clone (wi…

All the Alto schematics are available at Al Kossow's Bitsavers [1]. If you want to understand how it works, start with the hardware manual [2]. The Alto processor could probably be kept running indefinitely, since it uses standard parts that can be replaced. The monitor is more difficult; the Living Computer Museum made some new monitor boards for their Altos, cloning the existing boards. The disk drives are another…

LCM built MASSBUS adapters for their PDP-10's, its probably possible. (to be clear, the ALTO was built in total from COTS parts, the disks are of a known type used on many other minicomputers, including I believe the DG NOVA)

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#45

Post by pjmlp »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
zackmorris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. UNIX has some brilliant ideas, like isolated functions (executables) connected by streams, but beyond that it made a lot of mistakes that we are still dealing with today. The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data. It could have used a statically analyzable functional middleware of some kind, falling back to micro…

> The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data. That's pretty simple to explain: all those other options were just way too slow to get the kind of performance required out of the hardware available at the time. The difference was simply too large to be ignored. It's all nice and good to theorize about how the past should have…

> all those other options were just way too slow to get the kind of performance required out of the hardware available at the time. The difference was simply too large to be ignored.

If you compare with Xerox PARC hardware not really, the major issue was the price to produce the type of architecture they were having.

As for safe systems programming, Burroughs was already doing it a decade early in computer hardware much weaker than a PDP-11.

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#46

Post by theoh »

hobs wrote: post #18
digi_owl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JWZ may know his stuff, but damn he can be a salty asshole...

I usually like to leave more substantive comments on HN, but I don't think he would be mad if I said "that's kind of his thing."

As we all get older, I think it's understandable for some people to be frustrated by waves of what JWZ called (on one occasion) "anklebiters" arriving from HN. DDOS or not.

Wikipedia has an objective and some structure, whereas HN is, for all its uniqueness and value, not an organized activity.

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#47

Post by kens »

eschaton wrote: post #38
Animats wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked in some boxes I haven't opened in decades. I have "Mesa Language Manual, Version 5.0, April 1979". If the people with the Alto need this, let me know. If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far less buggy. Mesa was a hard-compiled language, but it had concurrency, monitors, co-routines ("ports", similar to Go channels), strong type safety, and a sane way to pass arrays around…

Please, both of you, get in touch with Al Kossow at the Computer History Museum about preserving these important pieces of our heritage.

I'll second eschaton's comment about preserving these old documents. Al Kossow has already preserved a lot of Alto documents at bitsavers [1] and I've found them extraordinarily useful for understanding how the Alto works.

[1] The Alto docs are at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ - I recommend the hardware reference (AltoHWRef.part1.pdf ) and the schematics (schematics/) The Mesa manual mentioned earlier is at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/C...

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#48

Post by Animats »

kens wrote: post #47
eschaton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, both of you, get in touch with Al Kossow at the Computer History Museum about preserving these important pieces of our heritage.

I'll second eschaton's comment about preserving these old documents. Al Kossow has already preserved a lot of Alto documents at bitsavers [1] and I've found them extraordinarily useful for understanding how the Alto works. [1] The Alto docs are at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ - I recommend the hardware reference (AltoHWRef.part1.pdf ) and the schematics (schematics/) The Mesa manual mentioned earlier is at ht…

That's exactly the version of the Mesa manual I have, so that's been preserved.

Nobody seems to be very interested in early UNIVAC mainframe stuff, which is most of what I have.

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#49

Post by rjsw »

ScottBurson wrote: post #43
dang wrote: post #27

We've all been fans of Ken's blog for years, so were thrilled that he took an interest in this project. Not only is Ken doing these amazing writeups, he gathered together the master restorers and engineers, some of whom worked on Altos at the time, who are now working on this one. Seeing them set to it, inspecting the Alto and figuring out what would be needed, was a lesson in self-organization. It was an honor to wa…

I have a Symbolics XL-1200 that I've been wondering what to do with. Would YC like it? It worked the last time I turned it on, but that was 4 or 5 years ago, probably. It's like triple-pizza-box size, not a refrigerator nor even the size of the Alto.

Wasn't the pizza-box one the XL-1201 ?

Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

#50

Post by to3m »

krylon wrote: post #5
dom96 wrote: post #2

My 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.

I've got 3 Dell 24" monitors that can be used in portrait mode. (U2412M - 95dpi 1920x1200 eIPS - not expensive. But many Dell monitors come with this sort of stand.) When I had a desktop PC with 2 GPUs I had them lined up that way in a row. It have to say it was a bit menacing at first - it's about a 48" diagonal. But, you know... you make do. I took a few pictures at the time but the only one I've got handy is it running Doom: http://ffe3.com/pics/.3monitors/IMG_1327.JPG

In the end I missed the horizontal space often enough that I've now settled on having at least one full-size - i.e., not laptop display - landscape display in the setup. (Currently I've got my laptop, 1 x landscape in front of me, and 1 x portrait to the side.)

If you're going to do this, I guess you want to buy IPS-type monitors to minimize colour discrepancies due to the wide range of viewing angles you'll be using. eIPS is supposed to have a 170° viewing angle, but the colours on mine still aren't quite consistent from side to side (or top to bottom as it is once rotated). If you've got a TN-type display I imagine it will be even worse.

Also might be worth buying all your monitors at once. I bought mine over a couple of years; the colour temperature is very slightly different on each one, even when using the factory-calibrated settings, and one has a noticeably different anti-glare coating.

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