Did the Alto have a graphical chat system?
Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#62I 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.
The Soul of a New Machine was about the 32-bit Data General Eclipse (1980), follow-on to the 16-bit Eclipse (1974), follow-on to the 16-bit Nova (1969), which provided the instruction set for the Alto. So not the same machine, but related.
(I find the Nova instruction set strangely similar to the ARM in many ways, but maybe I've just spent too much time looking at the ARM1.)
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Sure, no problem.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#64The original Macintosh really seems like it borrowed a lot aesthetically, in addition to the similarity in operation: http://lowendmac.com/1984/macintosh-128k/ http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto...
Well, Xerox got pre-IPO Apple stock, so I would hope Apple got something for the money.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#65The original Macintosh really seems like it borrowed a lot aesthetically, in addition to the similarity in operation: http://lowendmac.com/1984/macintosh-128k/ http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto...
I'm not seeing the aesthetic similarity between the Mac and the Alto, except that they're both beige, have a mouse, and are taller than wide. What specifically do you see in common?
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
Whoops, you're right, it is an XL1201 (without the dash, so I made two mistakes :-). The legend on the case is "XL1201 Compact".
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#67I haven't used one of those in a long time. Stanford had several Alto machines, but they didn't have Smalltalk, due to some licensing issue. They just ran standalone Mesa programs. When I was at Stanford, few people wanted to use the obsolete Altos, so time on them was available. So I did a small project on them. Bravo was used as both the text editor and the word processor. The file format was plain text, then a con…
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…
Maybe Modula-3 is too distant from Mesa to make this a valid point, but if not, there's a discussion to be had about why the Mesa-influenced Modula-3 (or the arguably essentially similar Ada) didn't sweep all before it in the 90s.
Is it that the "small set of sharp tools" provided by C, and the "safe and somewhat onerous discipline" provided by Modula-3 represent two points on an evolution that's converging towards the ideal systems programming language? Or maybe the language level is the wrong level at which to be considering this, as if we were analyzing prose at the level of phonemes?
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#68My uncle worked at PARC when this was being made. I probably wouldn't of gone into tech, if it weren't for him.
This makes me want to message him and ask him about his time there.
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One of the first Macs I ever saw back in the early 90s had a Radius pivot display which could be switched between landscape or portrait. As it was mostly used for DTP it made loads of sense.
I worked on screen saver engines that had to support these - We did a lot of direct access to the bit mapped display for speed, at the cost of compatability. That being said, there were OS hooks that made responding to the rotation easier.
The problem came in when running applications that didn't respond correctly to the configuration changes - since we had patched the os (transparently, particularly when not actually driving the display) we got blamed for a lot of application crashes and ended up debugging and sending very explicit bug reports to other software vendors.
When the iPhone came out, I was deathly afraid of the screen rotation for about 6 months, convinced as I was that 50% of the apps wouldn't respond gracefully. (And I personally have never found one that failed here.)
Re: Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
#70Xerox Alto brings back some memories indeed. I used one at CMU as a frosh to do engineering drawings for the Terragator (http://gizmodo.com/5072167/25-years-of-strange-and-wonderful...). Being new to computers, I didn't really get that a mouse and GUI were revolutionary. It just seemed so obvious. But that is the beauty of innovation done right - that to users it just seems obvious and natural.