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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

#71

Post by aswanson »

Animats wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #22

I 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…

Wow. Please conserve and write down what you have. Pivotal piece of computing history.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #22

I 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…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by e12e »

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.

At some point (I believe Windows 7), Windows started allowing the use of ctrl-alt-arrowkey to rotate the display. I think it depends a bit on the graphics drivers, but I also think most "standard" drivers (ie: Intel, Nvidia, AMD) supports it out of the box. It can be a bit confusing if you hit ctrl-alt-downarrow (invert screen) by surprise... (ctrl-alt-uparrow is the shortcut for standard mode).

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

#74

Post by fabled_giraffe »

kens wrote: post #65
fabled_giraffe wrote: post #59

The 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?

Monitors back then were wide then and the Alto turned the screen on its side. The Mac somewhat similarly had a screen that wasn't wide. The Mac mouse is also copied from the Alto's if you look at the shape.

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

#75

Post by e12e »

> The disk drive at the top of the cabinet takes a removable 2.5 megabyte disk cartridge. The small capacity of the disk was a problem for users, but files could also be accessed over the Ethernet from file servers.

(...)

> The Alto was introduced in 1973.

2.5 megabytes of removable/swappable storage ? In the 70s? I'm amazed that users found it constraining! That's more than even the Amiga managed to fit on 3.5" floppy disks (Unlike the PC which generally were only able to format for 1.44 MB, the Amiga generally fit ~1.8 on the raw 2MB HD 3.5" floppies).

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

#76

Post by Animats »

theoh wrote: post #67
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…

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 t…

No, it's that Compaq bought DEC, and then HP bought Compaq, and that ended the DEC Systems Research Center in downtown Palo Alto. That's where most Modula-3 development took place.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Systems_Research_Center

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

#77

Post by pjmlp »

dave2000 wrote: post #23
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. I'm not sure it cost anyone anything. I mean, a lot of the OSes were/are written in it, so if you were going to go down that path you'd have to not totally forget to add a rather large benefit in the credit side. It's hard to imagine but programming wasn't always about compe…

And that was already being done in the 60's with much better languages, but the UNIX revisionists don't like people spend time reading about Burroughs, Algol-68RS, PL/I, Mesa and many other languages provided by mainframe owners.

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

#78

Post by gumby »

Someone wrote: post #40
rjsw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why reverse engineer anything ? Just look up the logic diagram in your copy of The TTL Data Book.

Are all of them standard ones? If so, you're 100% right. Also, I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930327 , which states: "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]" That must make this one of the easiest pieces of hardware to keep running, at least for the digital parts (monitor and hard disk are more o…

I don't know of any nonstandard 7400 series parts (not sure what that would mean) but the low end ones (all the SSI and MSI) must have several suppliers even today.

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

#79

Post by pjmlp »

e12e wrote: post #75

> The disk drive at the top of the cabinet takes a removable 2.5 megabyte disk cartridge. The small capacity of the disk was a problem for users, but files could also be accessed over the Ethernet from file servers. (...) > The Alto was introduced in 1973. 2.5 mega bytes of removable/swappable storage ? In the 70s? I'm amazed that users found it constraining! That's more than even the Amiga managed to fit on 3.5" flo…

As Alan Kay states on his talks, for doing this type of research one needs to imagine how the hardware will look 15years from now and build such hardware, regardless how much expensive it might be.

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

#80

Post by pjmlp »

Animats wrote: post #76
theoh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

No, it's that Compaq bought DEC, and then HP bought Compaq, and that ended the DEC Systems Research Center in downtown Palo Alto. That's where most Modula-3 development took place.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Systems_Research_Center

Lucky HP has kept all DEC stuff alive, so anyone that wants to delve into Modula-2+, Modula-3 and everything that was built with them just needs to dive into the HP Labs repository.
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