19 Feb
2013
19 Feb
'13
5:46 p.m.
On 2/19/13 1:16 PM, "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 2/19/13 1:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
And frankly, that's what's exciting about those platforms! They were
incredibly flexible, relying on simplicity rather than complexity to offer
a broad range of expression. -- Ian
Does anyone know of anywhere I might be able to
read some reasonably
detailed accounts of the operating systems of the Xerox Smalltalk
workstations and Lisp Machines?
for Interlisp-D
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp
in particular,
3101272_InterlispD_1_Oct85.pdf
3101273_InterlispD_2_Oct85.pdf
3101274_InterlispD_3_Oct85.pdf
for Smalltalk
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/smalltalk
I don't have anything currently up for Smalltalk-80, but that
information is available in many other locations.
Both systems are byte coded interpreters running in microcode on various
impementations of a 16 bit CPU (Alto, Dorado, Dandelion, Daybreak).
The CPUs were underpowered compared to the 32 and 36 bit processors that
came out from
the East Coast (MIT/LMI/Symbolics) with the exception of the Dorado,
which was
probably the most complicated 16 bit CPU ever built.
With the exception of the "DandiTiger (Xerox 1109)" which supported more
memory and hardware
floating point, there really wasn't any special hardware for Smalltalk or
Lisp (or Mesa).