21 Jun
2016
21 Jun
'16
3:42 p.m.
Even if you never touch an Alto (and I hope that you someday can do so!),
it's interesting to look at BCPL, an ancestor of C. I learned to read it
fairly well when I was maintaining LCM's first Alto. -- Ian
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Paul McJones <paul at mcjones.org> wrote:
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
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