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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

#81

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Many of the Mesa researchers left Xerox PARC to join DEC.

There they created Modula-2+ with input from Niklaus Wirth that had created Modula and Modula-2 after his sabatical year at Xerox PARC.

Modula-2+ eventually became Modula-3, which was used for creating Spin OS, distributed objects network protocols and other interesting goodies.

Meanwhile at Xerox, Mesa evolved into Cedar. Niklaus Wirth on his second visit learned about this new system and created Oberon when he returned to ETHZ.

Oberon then gave birth to Oberon-2, Active Oberon and Component Pascal. The Gadgets framework in version System3 was great for a mid-90's workstation OS.

Nowadays I would say that C# is the spiritual successor of Modula-3, with Singularity, Midori and now .NET Native.

With Go taking the role of spiritual sucessor of Oberon.

Everyone should try to delve into books and papers from Burroughs, Xerox PARC, ETHZ, UK Royal Navy, DEC for an alternative view of doing systems programming the right way.

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

#82

Post by setpatchaddress »

fabled_giraffe wrote: post #74
kens wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What Mac are you talking about? The classic Mac screen was wider than it was tall.

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

#83

Post by kens »

fabled_giraffe wrote: post #74
kens wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not following you here - the Mac had a wide monitor, standard 4:3 CRT, totally unlike the Alto's portrait display. The Mac's mouse had one button, while the Alto's mouse had three buttons. Both had a rectangular shape, but that's the obvious shape to use (see Engelbart's mouse).

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

#84

Post by fernly »

kilroy123 wrote: post #68

My 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.

get him in touch with the restoration group!

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

#85

Post by kens »

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…

Keep in mind that although the Alto disk is removable, it is a hard disk, not a floppy; the user normally kept it mounted for a session, rather than using a new disk every time they load something. Thus, the disk needs to hold everything you need. (Although you could access files over the network with FTP.)

The user guide describes in great detail [1] why Alto users found 2.5MB of disk limiting. To summarize, the disk starts with 4800 512-byte pages. Basic OS stuff takes 900 pages. FTP and the editor take 900 pages. Fonts take more, as well as other commonly-needed software. So a non-programmer's disk typically has 1600 pages (800kB) available to work with. Programmers require more tools, so the free disk space is tighter. It seems people ended up needing to manage their disk space closely, even though 2.5MB sounds like a lot.

[1] See pdf page 20 of http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/stanford/StanfordAltoUse... for a discussion of why disk space on the Alto was rapidly used up.

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

#86

Post by 50CNT »

e12e wrote: post #73
krylon wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

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).

That happened to me when I was 11 using Windows XP. Since I couldn't figure out what I did I resorted to turning my monitor on its head for about a week.

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

#88

Post by digi_owl »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
gaius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And stack turtles.

Whenever i see a headline about unikernels, i envision doom running on DOS in a VM on top of Linux on top of some hardware somewhere. How many layers of (potentially leaky) abstractions are we looking at?

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

#89

Post by digi_owl »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
pjmlp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Kinda. Density allows for either speed or for price, and going for speed allowed the companies to hold the price fixed.

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

#90

Post by spacecop »

digi_owl wrote: post #17
hobs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the party didnt forget to check the link or have some joke in mind, jwz's site always does if you have HN as a referrer.

JWZ may know his stuff, but damn he can be a salty asshole...

What an interesting fellow! I'd like to subscribe to his newsletter.
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