20 Jan
1999
20 Jan
'99
11:07 a.m.
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Chuck McManis wrote:
I'm not familar with the Terak and PERQ but I am
intimately familiar with
the Star and the Alto. My wife was the Network Services Architect for
Xeroxes Office Systems Business Unit during the Star's heyday. The fact was
that the Star was sold as a dedicated word processor. A visual typewriter
if you will on the same price sheet as the memory writers I believe. Now
Yes, Xerox is famous for mismarketing, but are you saying that a
mouse-driven bitmapped networked 8010 isn't a workstation because of where
it was on a price sheet?
tahoe (later named the Xerox Development Environment
(XDE)) ran on
Dandelions (aka the 8010 series) but it wasn't sold to third parties.
Later during the Daybreak years Mesa (waayy cool language BTW) was
ported to Suns and Intel architectures. I don't believe the Alto ever
escaped PARC as more than a research tool for some folks.
I forget the number: either 1000 or 2000 Altos were made and "seeded"
various universities. Probably made a bigger dent than the Sun 1, and
much earlier.
The "PERQ page" asserts the claim to first
graphics workstation, I'm sure
Probably true if you ignore the Alto. And the Terak was a PDP-11/03 with
a bitmapped display around 1979/1980 IIRC. They were quite popular at
UCSD and UCI, at least.
-- Doug