17 Sep
2010
17 Sep
'10
10:41 a.m.
On 9/16/2010 3:24 PM, William Maddox wrote:
--- On Thu, 9/16/10, Tony Duell<ard at
p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
My understanding is that Brian Rosen, one of the founders of 3RCC
(creators of the PERQ) worked at Xerox PARC for a time in the mid-late
70's, but he was frustrated with Xerox's inability/unwillingness to
commercialize the Alto in any significant way. The PERQ was the result
of this frustration. So yes, the PERQ was influenced by the Alto in
some rather major ways :).
(There's a nice writeup here:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/part_1/c5.htm
-- this is an interesting site to read about ICL/3RCC and the PERQ, just
FYI...)
- Josh
I wonder if it's a conincidence that the PERQ
POS
filesystem recovery
tool is also called 'scavenger' and that the PERQ
filesystem also stores
all the pointers at least twice so it's posisble to recover
from quite
bad disk corruption. Not that any PERQ had a dmountable
hard disk.
The Perq was the result of a visit (sabbatical?) at Xerox PARC
by one of the principals of Three Rivers Computer, much like
the way Lilith originated from Wirth's experiences there.
I believe that the original code name of the Perq was the
"PascAlto", referring to its obvious heritage, but with the
intent to base the software on UCSD Pascal rather than BCPL.
Undoubtedly the Perq owes much to the Alto, as did every other
similar graphical workstation of that era.
--Bill