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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

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Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#41

Post by fzzzy »

fzzzy wrote: post #40
dalke wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have drawn an incorrect inference from that text. Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project at Apple, was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year. He and others in the AI lab "were tightly intermixed with the people at PARC" (Quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interview... ). I believe he knew what a Starlike WIMP user interface entailed. He also "explained the details and rat…

I don't think Raskin liked WIMP very much. You can see what his original vision for the Macintosh was in the Canon Cat, which he went on to develop after leaving apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#42

Post by bane »

digi_owl wrote: post #18
kens wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chapter 23 of "Dealers of Lightning" points out that everyone describes the Steve Jobs visit(s) in contradictory ways. "No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. PARC engineers disagree about who delivered what portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado..." I recommend "Dealers of Light…

No surprise that Jobs would fixate on the UI thing. He never struck me as a techie, but someone that got into tech because it was easy to mesmerize people with. The UI was a perfect tool for that.

Yeah, that makes a certain kind of sense. I'm spending some spare time listening to interviews with old Atari employees on the ANTIC podcast and one thing comes through again and again. Lots of investment was being made in networking and programming languages and almost nobody outside of PARC had any real ideas about GUIs. A couple Atari employees who came from PARC at the time tried to get it into products, but just couldn't.

Apple likewise didn't produce a GUI for their contemporary computers.

The most that people seemed to really be shooting for was higher density text displays and colorful graphics, but nobody had really figured out the magical combination of manipulation device and interface metaphor and Jobs did just "get it" and understood why it would be a major differentiator - few people had more than one computer to network, and few people liked programming.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#43

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

dalke wrote: post #32
kens wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chapter 23 of "Dealers of Lightning" points out that everyone describes the Steve Jobs visit(s) in contradictory ways. "No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. PARC engineers disagree about who delivered what portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado..." I recommend "Dealers of Light…

I'm more interested in what was going on before the visit, because the myth is that Jobs was like Prometheus. To counter that myth, we must look into what people knew earlier. Quoting from the Standford link I mentioned before, at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html : > Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the 1979 visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh (a collection of essays…

Jobs may not have been Promethean in the foresight department, but he made a pretty good go of it in the "having your liver taken out of you" department.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#44

Post by userbinator »

mzs wrote: post #23
russellsprouts wrote: post #19

The shift-xor "random" number generator described actually has an interesting property. The algorithm looks like this: 1. If the value is 0, output the magic number. 2. If the value has only its high bit set, output 0. 3. Otherwise, shift the value to the left 4. if there was an overflow (the high bit was 1 before the shift), xor the value by a magic constant. For certain values of the magic constant, this has the pr…

And with 077213 and 012345 octal that is what happens. That's why the distribution was so uniform when Ken checked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register...

I suspect it was deliberately chosen to do this for the purposes of testing the disk; the sequence is random-looking so it exercises all the bits, but is also deterministic so that written data can be verified by reading it back and comparing without having to store a copy of all the written data somewhere else.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#45

Post by Stratoscope »

fzzzy wrote: post #41
fzzzy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Raskin liked WIMP very much. You can see what his original vision for the Macintosh was in the Canon Cat, which he went on to develop after leaving apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

If you're near the SF Peninsula and are curious to see a Cat in person, I have a working one here in Menlo Park, and an open invitation to any HN regulars who are interested in trying it out.

It is indeed a very different UI concept! No pointing device. No graphics. Not even cursor keys, instead it has LEAP keys to navigate.

I keep thinking I should sell the machine since I don't really do anything with it, but it's here for the time being. Email is in my profile.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#46

Post by Animats »

Stratoscope wrote: post #45
fzzzy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

If you're near the SF Peninsula and are curious to see a Cat in person, I have a working one here in Menlo Park, and an open invitation to any HN regulars who are interested in trying it out. It is indeed a very different UI concept! No pointing device. No graphics. Not even cursor keys, instead it has LEAP keys to navigate. I keep thinking I should sell the machine since I don't really do anything with it, but it's…

It's a cute device. Today you could emulate it in Javascript, which would yield a decent editor.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#47

Post by monkpit »

kiwijamo wrote: post #28
monkpit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these posts too, but man is it a pain to read on mobile. Quit hijacking my input! Edit: I know I can use the readability mode, but I don't like being essentially forced to do so.

Looked fine on iPhone. What phone do you have?

iPhone 6s and safari. If I zoom in on a picture and touch the image at all, when I let go the page navigates to the image as if I clicked on it.

Also in my efforts to zoom in on things, the page registers a left/right swipe and decides I want to go to the next/previous blog post.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#48

Post by monkpit »

kens wrote: post #7
monkpit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these posts too, but man is it a pain to read on mobile. Quit hijacking my input! Edit: I know I can use the readability mode, but I don't like being essentially forced to do so.

Can you explain what the problem is? I recently switched the mobile formatting so Google would stop complaining that my page wasn't optimized for mobile. But maybe that made things worse.

I left a more detailed reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514009) to the other person in the thread, but basically while trying to zoom I get sent to other posts or images.

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#49

Post by kens »

monkpit wrote: post #47
kiwijamo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looked fine on iPhone. What phone do you have?

iPhone 6s and safari. If I zoom in on a picture and touch the image at all, when I let go the page navigates to the image as if I clicked on it. Also in my efforts to zoom in on things, the page registers a left/right swipe and decides I want to go to the next/previous blog post.

I don't quite understand the problem. You say when you touch an image and let go, it navigates to the image as if you clicked on it. Isn't touching and letting go the definition of clicking?

Re: Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data

#50

Post by fzzzy »

Stratoscope wrote: post #45
fzzzy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

If you're near the SF Peninsula and are curious to see a Cat in person, I have a working one here in Menlo Park, and an open invitation to any HN regulars who are interested in trying it out. It is indeed a very different UI concept! No pointing device. No graphics. Not even cursor keys, instead it has LEAP keys to navigate. I keep thinking I should sell the machine since I don't really do anything with it, but it's…

I lived in the Bay Area for 15 years, but I don't any more. Thanks for the offer. I would love to see it.

There seems to be very little information about it on YouTube. It would be great if you could make some videos about it, or lend it to someone who could. I would do it if I were still in California. I have really been getting into documenting obscure retro computer stuff recently. Mostly old Macs. I have 14. :-)

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