21 Jun
2016
21 Jun
'16
12:31 p.m.
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.
It?s been scanned:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/CSL_79-3_Mes…
... 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. ...
The designers of the concurrency mechanisms (Butler Lampson and Dave Redell) wrote an
excellent paper, which can be downloaded from Lampson?s web site:
http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/23-ProcessesInMe…
Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to
hear more about it.
Thanks to the foresight of Al Kossow and others, the Computer History Museum has a
repository of Alto source code online, including the Mesa system and some applications
such as the Laurel electronic mail client and the Grapevine distributed mail transport and
name service. (The repository also includes a lot of BCPL and a small amount of
Smalltalk.) The repository is here:
http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org
Probably better to start here:
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/
http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html
Paul McJones