[HN Gopher] Xerox Alto Emulator
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Xerox Alto Emulator
Author : hsnewman
Score : 106 points
Date : 2021-08-18 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archives.loomcom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (archives.loomcom.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| That is not how you announce an emulator on HN. You must say:
| "How to build your own Xerox Alto Workstation".
| novok wrote:
| Wow this is pretty cool. I wonder how different the native github
| version performs.
| rjsw wrote:
| The native version is written in C#, there is another emulator
| [1] that will run on more systems.
|
| [1] https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator
| AlbertCory wrote:
| People talking about the Xerox Star are _mostly_ correct, but the
| statement that "by that time most of the PARC researchers had
| long since left Xerox" is quite wrong. Star was announced April
| 1981, and a couple PARC guys (Belleville, Tesler) had left or
| would soon, but it was certainly not "long since."
|
| I just gave a talk at the Vintage Computer Federation West about
| a week ago, about my book [1]. There's a photo of a guy playing
| MazeWar on the cover, and it was taken November 2020 on a working
| Alto (restored by a guy from the Living Computer Museum,
| actually!)
|
| I was part of Star, and I wrote the book as a novel mainly so you
| could see how something like that happens. None of the characters
| have hindsight, which is a flaw with most histories. And they
| have real lives outside of Xerox.
|
| We did run XDE on our Altos. It was written entirely in Mesa.
|
| [1] www.albertcory.io
| kstrauser wrote:
| I so rarely get to bring this up, but here's picture of my mom
| and her Star workstation circa 1983 or so:
| https://honeypot.net/images/mom-and-star.jpg
|
| She was Wire Chief for the Burlington Northern railroad, and
| they used that to manage all the systems that keep trains
| running.
|
| As a side note, I'm always a little shocked when I learn of
| workplace sexism. When I was a kid, this is what I thought
| programmers looked like. I was happy to learn that I could be
| into computers, too.
| killion wrote:
| It's a very different experience than I expected. When I think of
| the Alto I think of a windowing operating system but this boots
| into a command line. I've tried out most of the available disks
| but haven't yet found one that feels like a predecessor to the
| Apple Lisa.
|
| It's a great project that is really well done, it's the actual
| experience of the Alto that surprised.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You are likely thinking of the Xerox Star aka the Dandelion
| which was a product of Xerox Business Systems (a spinoff from
| the PARC work). I didn't look too closely but if one of the
| packs has XDE on it (the Xerox Development Environment) then
| you'll get the same windows experience that was demonstrated to
| Steve Jobs back in the day. I'm pretty sure you could run XDE
| on the Alto (my wife worked at XBS while I was at Sun and there
| was a lot of cross mingling of technical people at various
| social events but my memories of exactly what the Alto was
| capable of are more limited.) We had a get together once over
| at the office and booted mazewar on six or seven Altos and that
| was a lot of fun.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You're thinking of the Xerox Star, not the Alto. An Alto
| running Smalltalk had a windowing environment, but not what
| you're used to. The Star had a full WIMP system with desktop
| metaphor, also not one you'd be used to but very powerful and
| intuitive.
| musicale wrote:
| folklore.org has some interesting bits on the evolution of the
| Lisa interface:
|
| 1. Hertzfeld says that Steve Jobs saw Smalltalk rather than the
| Alto or Star GUI:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_...
|
| Larry Tesler and others moving from Xerox to Apple is perhaps a
| more direct path for technology transfer. And of course the
| Star actually shipped two years before the Lisa.
|
| 2. The evolution of the GUI itself is particularly interesting,
| showing the appearance of the menu bar/pulldown menus and Mac-
| style scroll bars:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born....
|
| Apparently Jobs gets credit for the extensive use of rounded
| rectangles:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
|
| 3. Apparently Bill Atkinson was inspired by MIT's Dataland to
| implement a spatial layout based Lisa Filer
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Rosings_Rascals....
| shawnz wrote:
| I think you're thinking of the Xerox "Star", not the "Alto":
|
| http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Great link. This is a super interesting write up on the
| development of the Darkstar emulator, complete with many
| screenshots: https://engblg.livingcomputers.org/index.php/201
| 9/01/19/intr...
|
| "Someone" should make a scaled model of the 6085 (Daybreak)
| and stuff a darkstar emulator in there.
|
| ADD: I cry salty tears that I didn't make it to The Living
| Computer Museum before they closed.
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| LCM isn't gone, just hibernating.
| killion wrote:
| You are right, I thought the Star was just the commercialized
| version of the Alto. The Star looks much more like the Xerox
| Docutech that I got to use a little bit in school.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| The Xerox Star is the machine that had a direct influence on
| the look of the Lisa software.
|
| The Star was Xerox's big swing to try and enter the exploding
| business computer market.
|
| Xerox assembled a huge team of software engineers to build a
| networked office system based on the initial research from
| PARC, but by that time most of the PARC researchers had long
| since left Xerox to join the rest of the industry.
|
| The Star was the result of that effort, released the same year
| as the IBM PC, but it was a flop.
|
| The Star and the Lisa were similar in that they're both the
| opposite of the "start small, do one thing really well, and
| iterate" methodology. Both were impressive in the long list of
| features they tried to introduce all at once, and both ended up
| as not very good systems.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| I didn't realize that Star and PC were released together -
| what a contrast! Unfortunately the Star was too closed and
| too expensive to succeed, but it also doesn't seem that Xerox
| had the culture to do it any other way.
|
| Xerox continued being active in this field for a long time
| and showcased some amazing work on visualizing and navigating
| ordered graphs with 3D graphics (can't find the article I'm
| afraid) which were way ahead of the time.
| watersb wrote:
| I'm not sure about the Xerox Star being "too closed" to
| succeed; I believe it incorporated Ethernet networking
| (another PARC innovation).
|
| Upon release, the IBM PC was not PC compatible, as the not-
| quite-ISA was 8 bits, only a single interrupt controller,
| the power connector was not ATX (neither was the
| motherboard). Nobody's monitor was multisync...
|
| Compatibility wasn't a thing.
|
| (So ironic, it must have been intentional: the BYTE issue
| featuring "Standards" as the theme has the Apple Lisa and
| Apple II on the cover:
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-02
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Welcome to the Alto - that is exactly how it worked. There's no
| "desktop environment", as they were just beginning to figure
| out how to make applications with windows, icons, mouse cursor,
| etc. The closest to what you expected to see is probably the
| Smalltalk environment.
|
| The other part of this is that it's been dramatically
| overstated how much Apple "took" from Xerox. This issue of BYTE
| (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02) has awesome
| details on the development of the Mac (and a bit on the Lisa).
|
| EDIT: wording
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| That BYTE issue is so incredibly fascinating. Thanks a lot
| for posting it. The in-depth interviews with Hertzfeld,
| Atkinson, Jobs, a diagram of the Mac's memory map (page 40),
| a block diagram of the Mac hardware (page 36), etc.
| killion wrote:
| It also reminds me that computer magazines were ~500 pages
| when I was a kid.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Personally I can't believe how many of those pages I
| actually read and processed.
|
| It makes me reflect that a lot of what I'm doing on the
| web these days really is reading, even though it doesn't
| involve books, and is comparatively
| technical/informational.
|
| Those mags were fun though, and I remember reactions from
| "check out how many stars they gave Turbo Pascal" to
| "what a goofy author photo" to "somebody wrote in with a
| great system script" to "oh there's an obscure game
| company in Vermont still writing arcade titles for dad's
| office computer" :-)
| watersb wrote:
| Yeah that issue is a masterpiece.
|
| You should also check out the BYTE Smalltalk issue:
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
| dang wrote:
| Past related post about the Windows-only version of this:
|
| _Simulating a Xerox Alto with the ContrAlto Simulator: Games and
| Smalltalk_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769635 - Oct
| 2016 (1 comment)
|
| (That 1 comment is no good but Ken's article is, typically,
| fabulous.)
| gumby wrote:
| Brings back lots of good memories. Did some of my high school
| homework on the Alto -- I remember one teacher writing on one of
| my essays "Cool typewriter" (he'd of course never seen a laser
| printer, so couldn't imagine what dover output was).
| ilaksh wrote:
| I wonder what the Xerox of today is. Something with AR/VR maybe?
| Or maybe an AI company?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The Xerox/AT&Ts of today, as those of the past, are the big
| tech monopolies (roughly FAANG + Microsoft).
| a-dub wrote:
| microsoft. maker of drab and mundane on-prem office automation
| machines that generate more problems than they solve and are
| cursed the world over during their frequent and often humorous
| malfunctions.
|
| ms research (who do really cool stuff) is their xerox parc
| twoodfin wrote:
| _Missile Command 3.0 by Avadis Tevanian, Jr._
|
| That was a shock for the first command I ran!
| spitfire wrote:
| That actually makes a bit of sense. NeXT (which reverse bought
| and absorbed Apple) was a weird pragmatic/bastard Smalltalk on
| top of Unix type system. To see that Avie hard worked on
| smalltalk (as well as microkernels) isn't a shock to me.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I doubt that Missile Command was written in Smalltalk,
| probably in BCPL or Mesa like most of the software for that
| machine was.
|
| EDIT: http://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/wp-
| content/uploads/20...
|
| "Avie Tevanian: In undergrad school I did something strange-I
| studied with TV in the background. I remember they had a lab
| that was mostly for grad students, but they let me in. For
| computers back then, they had Xerox Altos, which later
| inspired the Macintosh, and I'd write games while watching
| 1V. I'd write my own games, and I created my own versions of
| Defender and Missile Command as an exercise. My Macintosh
| versions of those two games are still out there, free on the
| public domain. Missile Command's actually not too bad - it
| teaches valuable lessons about survivability in a nuclear
| holocaust."
| nahuel0x wrote:
| The Mesa language wikipedia entry is very interesting:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language)
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(page generated 2021-08-18 23:00 UTC)