21 Jun
2016
21 Jun
'16
8:14 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> wrote:
ISTR that BravoX was written in Mesa. -- Ian
--
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."
Mesa became the basis for much of the software on
Xerox's later
D-machines (the Star and its successors). It was compiled into
a
byte-coded stack-based machine code (the bytecode interpreter was
implemented in microcode on the Alto and later machines) and apparently the
code density was pretty remarkable (from what I've read). The Viewpoint
GUI and applications were written in it. It was a strongly-typed
high-level language with exceptions. I don't (yet) have any direct
experience in using the language, but it's something I want to get around
to one of these days.
- Josh