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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #101
ScottBurson wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #52
ScottBurson wrote: post #43

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by digi_owl »

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 find myself wonder if it is a problem of human computer IO.

The minimal set of reliable human computer interface is a keyboard and a screen. going beyond that quickly add either noise, delays, or both.

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

#105

Post by digi_owl »

dang wrote: post #97
pjmlp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This point is so important that Alan has emphasized it as one thing we're mostly missing. The Alto was not meant to be a personal computer but a "personal supercomputer"—hardware so far ahead of the curve that it could run the software of the future. In other words, not a personal computer but a machine for inventing personal computing with , which of course they proceeded to do. Having such hardware is what makes it…

> It seems to have been an enormous frustration to Alan and his colleagues that they were unable to persude hardware vendors to make such hardware at any price

No surprise there. Hardware production is frankly inherently conservative unless one is a startup (aka, nothing to lose but ones pride). This because you have all the up front cost of tooling and production runs before you even know how well something will sell.

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

#106

Post by jecel »

protomyth wrote: post #57

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.

Xerox did license Smalltalk-80 to Apple. It was one of the products promised at Lisa's launch, but it was never delivered. It was ported to the Mac and became available to registered developers (I got version 0.7 through a friend who was a developer). In 1996 this evolved into Squeak and Apple was able to release it as free software thanks to its license from Xerox. Some people complained about the Squeak license, so in 2006 Apple re-released its part of Squeak under the Apache license (and the rest was re-released under the MIT X11 license by each part's author).

Xerox gave the same license to Tektronix (which launched its 4404 and 4406 Smalltalk computers), HP (which created Distributed Smalltalk) and DEC. The DEC license was extended to UC Berkeley.

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

#107

Post by protomyth »

jecel wrote: post #106
protomyth wrote: post #57

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.

Xerox did license Smalltalk-80 to Apple. It was one of the products promised at Lisa's launch, but it was never delivered. It was ported to the Mac and became available to registered developers (I got version 0.7 through a friend who was a developer). In 1996 this evolved into Squeak and Apple was able to release it as free software thanks to its license from Xerox. Some people complained about the Squeak license, so…

According to 'Dealers in Lightning' they did not license it when Apple asked the first time. They did when they licensed it to everyone else. This was all pre-Squeak.

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

#108

Post by jecel »

protomyth wrote: post #107
jecel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xerox did license Smalltalk-80 to Apple. It was one of the products promised at Lisa's launch, but it was never delivered. It was ported to the Mac and became available to registered developers (I got version 0.7 through a friend who was a developer). In 1996 this evolved into Squeak and Apple was able to release it as free software thanks to its license from Xerox. Some people complained about the Squeak license, so…

According to 'Dealers in Lightning' they did not license it when Apple asked the first time. They did when they licensed it to everyone else. This was all pre-Squeak.

The first Smalltalk-80 tape was delivered to Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC on February 17, 1981. So in a way, they all had licenses at this point though it was more a contract to review the system and the book that was being written as well as dedicating at least two engineers each to try to implement it. Three more tapes followed (the last one probably early in 1982).

When Smalltalk-80 Version 2 was released all four companies got a free license for it which allowed them to do anything they wanted, including re-release it under a different license. Which is what Apple did (three times) with Squeak. The Version 2 license is from 1982 while the Squeak licenses are from 1996 and 2006.

But you are right - Xerox did not give Apple any special treatment compared to the other three, though it did compared to the world in general.

Note that Apple had several Smalltalk users involved in the development of the Lisa and the Macintosh, but they felt Smalltalk was too much for the machines they were creating. Steve Jobs felt that was still the case when developing the NeXT, which is why they used the Smalltalk/C hybrid Objective-C.

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

#109

Post by jecel »

gumby wrote: post #78
Someone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first Altos used early dynamic RAM chips which required some really oddball chips to talk to TTL. I imagine that both the memories and the interface chips are probably very hard to find these days. But this particular Alto is five years newer and probably doesn't have these problems.

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

#110

Post by protomyth »

jecel wrote: post #108
protomyth wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to 'Dealers in Lightning' they did not license it when Apple asked the first time. They did when they licensed it to everyone else. This was all pre-Squeak.

The first Smalltalk-80 tape was delivered to Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC on February 17, 1981. So in a way, they all had licenses at this point though it was more a contract to review the system and the book that was being written as well as dedicating at least two engineers each to try to implement it. Three more tapes followed (the last one probably early in 1982). When Smalltalk-80 Version 2 was released all four…

Thanks for the info. Now, if I understand the time line for Lisa, what you have said, and what 'dealers in Lightning' have said; the book must be refering to a pre 1980 decision (or the book is out to lunch)? When did Lisa actually start?

// sorry for the latency on my responses, I'm driving west on I94

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