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The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has released another foundational piece of software to the world at large: some of the code that gave the world the Xerox Alto computer, which among other things helped inspire a couple of young garage developers, Steves Jobs and Wozniak. To the modern eye, the Alto looks odd – …

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  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Portrait Screens

    To the modern eye, the Alto looks odd – mostly because of the portrait orientation of its screen

    At my place of work, a lot of people have portrait screens.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Hans 1
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: Portrait Screens

      Yeah, author is not a dev ... You really only need landscape mode to watch movies, look at pics ... for coding, internet etc portrait is better .... it certainly allows you to see more lines of code ...

      5 0 Reply
      1. Fredrick Smith
        Reply Icon

        Re: Portrait Screens

        Not if you plan to write the whole program on one line.

        3 0 Reply
        1. kmac499
          Reply Icon

          Re: Portrait Screens

          Scab: Didn't you know Coders get paid by the number ot times they pressed the enter key in a program..

          2 0 Reply
    2. Alan J. Wylie
      Reply Icon

      Re: Portrait Screens

      It looks familiar, and no wonder: the design of the PERQ I remember from the early 80s was influenced by the Xerox Alto.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ

      The FORTRAN compiler used to grab some of the screen RAM, resulting in random flashes over half the screen.

      0 0 Reply
  2. PassiveSmoking

    Not the first GUI

    NLS beat it to the punch by a good few years.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29

    1 0 Reply
  3. Simon Harris

    Just need the schematics now

    and a pile of 74181s so we can build something to run the code on.

    0 0 Reply
  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Still need the microcode for the chips and the detailed specs.

    Alto was a microcoded processor. So without the microcode you can't map the executables to the Alto opcodes.

    BTW Is "Bravo" word processor the core for MS Windows?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Julian 4
      Reply Icon

      Re: Still need the microcode for the chips and the detailed specs.

      Hi John,

      You don't need the microcode to run the executables because the Alto microcode implements specialised instruction sets for running user programs. It's emulators for the instruction sets you need.

      The standard instruction set was almost identical to the Data General Nova minicomputer instruction set and the BCPL compiler targeted that.

      There was a byte-code instruction set for the Mesa compiler; another for Smalltalk; and yet another for Lisp.

      Nevertheless, Alto software will be so Alto hardware specific you'd need an Alto emulator too (and there is one that kinda runs OK).

      http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html

      1 0 Reply
  5. Frenchie Lad

    Dorado

    If you're looking at inspirational systems then surely you need to mention the Dorado and Smalltalk which were the most influential of all for the likes of Jobs & Gates.

    1 0 Reply

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