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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

#51

Post by kens »

Animats wrote: post #48
kens wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I'd like to see the UNIVAC stuff preserved, even if it doesn't have the name recognition of, say, IBM or Xerox. Maybe I could write a blog post about UNIVAC some day - do you have anything interesting I could write about?

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

#52

Post by dang »

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.

I think the answer to that is very likely: hell yeah! But we should wait until the Alto is running. Can we keep in touch about this?

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

#53

Post by gaius »

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…

The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around

Every 10 years or so the industry just restarts the same loop it's been stuck in since the Amiga (actually the Amiga is probably the first loop starting with the Alto) just with different syntax and faster hardware. Software is stagnant; ALL progress in in hardware. And with the end of Moore's Law that is grinding to a halt too.

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

#54

Post by dang »

kps wrote: post #35
gumby wrote: post #21

I used the Alto at MIT (and for fun when I worked at PARC -- we had more powerful machines by then). There are two other things about the alto that have really stuck in my mind. First, the whole thing uses only 300 SSI and MSI TTL chips! No higher order chips (no LSI, much less VLSI). The other is that the bus bandwidth was only 3/2 the screen update rate. Updating the screen was really important: this was a user-cen…

> most glass TTYs (think ADM-3A, Hazeltine, VT-52, and I believe > the 3270 as well) were taller than they were wide That's mistaken. http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_... http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Hazeltine_100... http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 Edit: Yes, I should have replied to the other comment…

(If you want to post a link to the comment you meant to reply to, we'll move it and delete this one.)

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

#55

Post by jacquesm »

gaius wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around Every 10 years or so the industry just restarts the same loop it's been stuck in since the Amiga (actually the Amiga is probably the first loop starting with the Alto) just with different syntax and faster hardware. Software is stagnant; ALL progress in in hardware. And with the end of Moore's Law that is grinding to a halt…

I have some hope that with the end of Moore's law in sight we will finally be able to concentrate on the software for some progress. All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And in a way that's a real pity. It could have been that if Moore's law had been a doubling in 30 years rather than 18 months that we'd have had a lot more appreciation for writing good software. As it was the crap won out over the good stuff simply by being bailed out by Moore's law just in time for the next cycle.

But in some alternate universe hardware progress was so slow that any gains had to come from better software.

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

#56

Post by jacquesm »

pjmlp wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Moore's law is essentially about density (and hence about price), not about speed, the speed was a side-effect.

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

#57

Post by protomyth »

There are so many points in the computer industry where one or a small group's decisions changed everything. After listening to "Dealers in Lightning" you wonder about quite a lot of decisions. One of the later ones got me to thinking, what would have happened if Xerox had not got rid of its pre-IPO Apple stock and allowed the Lisa team to license Smalltalk? I wonder the sequence at that point with the Mac.

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

#58

Post by rst »

Animats wrote: post #48
kens wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kossow does collect Univac mainframe stuff, though there are gaps. (Last I checked, bitsavers didn't have any Flow-matic docs, which is frustrating considering that language's historic importance -- though whatever exists would be a couple of decades older than the Alto.)

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

#60

Post by vram22 »

gumby wrote: post #21

I used the Alto at MIT (and for fun when I worked at PARC -- we had more powerful machines by then). There are two other things about the alto that have really stuck in my mind. First, the whole thing uses only 300 SSI and MSI TTL chips! No higher order chips (no LSI, much less VLSI). The other is that the bus bandwidth was only 3/2 the screen update rate. Updating the screen was really important: this was a user-cen…

Interesting about portrait mode monitors, and overall. Was the DG Nova the same machine mentioned in The Soul of a New Machine? Read it a while back.
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