21 Jun
2016
21 Jun
'16
6:46 a.m.
From the discussions around Y Combinator's Alto
restoration...
(Some may not know that the founder of Y Combinator is Paul Graham,
using some of the money Yahoo! paid him for Viaweb, which became Yahoo
Stores. PG is a Lisp champion and evangelist.)
The Alto restoration is being discussed on Hacker News, Y Combinator's
very successful forums:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929396
This comment struck me:
?
Animats 2 days ago
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.
If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far
less buggy. 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. In the 1970s.
(I should donate this stuff to the Computer Museum. I just found the
original DEC Small Computer Manual, many 1960s UNIVAC mainframe
manuals, and a reel of UNIVAC I steel magnetic tape.)
?
I knew that the original Smalltalk boxes weren't Smalltalk all the way
down to the metal, and that there was an OS and language, Mesa,
underneath... but I didn't know it was used for anything much *else*
or that some considered it important.
Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to hear more about it.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
21 Jun
21 Jun
7:17 a.m.
On 2016-06-21 9:46 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
That's for certain. It's one of several systems programming languages
with safety: the Solo operating system in Concurrent Pascal is another
example.
From the
discussions around Y Combinator's Alto restoration...
(Some may not know that the founder of Y Combinator is Paul Graham,
using some of the money Yahoo! paid him for Viaweb, which became Yahoo
Stores. PG is a Lisp champion and evangelist.)
The Alto restoration is being discussed on Hacker News, Y Combinator's
very successful forums:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929396
This comment struck me:
?
Animats 2 days ago
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.
If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far
less buggy. 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. In the 1970s.
(I should donate this stuff to the Computer Museum. I just found the
Scan & publish the documents first, if that can be done without
guillotining -- because they won't.
[Actually if anyone knows who accepts paper documents, please comment;
currently I know Jason Scott / Internet Archive does? I plan to scan a
lot of what I have then divest the paper.]
original DEC Small Computer Manual, many 1960s UNIVAC
mainframe
manuals, and a reel of UNIVAC I steel magnetic tape.)
?
I knew that the original Smalltalk boxes weren't Smalltalk all the way
down to the metal, and that there was an OS and language, Mesa,
underneath... but I didn't know it was used for anything much *else*
or that some considered it important.
Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to hear more about it.
The operating system "Pilot" was written in Mesa. A relevant paper is
reprinted in Brinch Hansen's "Classic Operating Systems": "Pilot: An
Operating System for a Personal Computer" (1980).
Another paper cited in the book is "Early experience with Mesa,"
Geschke, C.M., J.H. Morris Jr., and E.H. Satterthwaite, Comm. ACM 20, 8
(Aug 1977). (later, Geschke was a cofounder of Adobe Systems).
--Toby
8:09 a.m.
On 6/21/16 6:46 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
The "original" Smalltalk box(*),
the Alto, wasn't Mesa-based. (Mesa was
originally developed on the Alto, sort of in parallel with Smalltalk).
Smalltalk was originally written in Alto assembly language (which was
basically Data General Nova assembly) and was later implemented in Alto
microcode and became self-hosting/bootstrapping (it was written in
itself). Smalltalk was never written in Mesa, though on the later
D-machines it ran inside a Mesa-based environment.
(*) The original Smalltalk prototype was written in BASIC on a Data
General Nova. It wasn't very fast.
From the
discussions around Y Combinator's Alto restoration...
(Some may not know that the founder of Y Combinator is Paul Graham,
using some of the money Yahoo! paid him for Viaweb, which became Yahoo
Stores. PG is a Lisp champion and evangelist.)
The Alto restoration is being discussed on Hacker News, Y Combinator's
very successful forums:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929396
This comment struck me:
?
Animats 2 days ago
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.
If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far
less buggy. 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. In the 1970s.
(I should donate this stuff to the Computer Museum. I just found the
original DEC Small Computer Manual, many 1960s UNIVAC mainframe
manuals, and a reel of UNIVAC I steel magnetic tape.)
?
I knew that the original Smalltalk boxes weren't Smalltalk all the way
down to the metal, and that there was an OS and language, Mesa,
underneath... but I didn't know it was used for anything much *else*
or that some considered it important.
Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to hear more about it.
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
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
8:25 a.m.
On 6/21/16 8:14 AM, Ian S. King wrote:
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Josh Dersch
<derschjo at gmail.com> wrote:
ISTR that BravoX was written in Mesa. -- Ian
Yes it was, as was MazeWar and the Laurel mail client (and many other
things).
- Josh
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
9:49 a.m.
On 6/21/16 8:25 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
Yes it was, as was MazeWar and the Laurel mail client
(and many other things).
Alto software evolved throughout the 70's. It started out bare-bones as they
bootstrapped
themselves up. Mesa was developed in parallel, as was Smalltalk. Mesa is an Algol-like
strongly typed language with the notion of modules and with internal and external
interface.
This is all documented on bitsavers and in the source tree at CHM. Mesa is a bit too big
to
run comfortably even on the max memory Alto with two disk drives. By the time the
language
was in wider use they had D-machines to run it on. SDD stayed with Mesa for their product
development, PARC CSL evolved Mesa into Cedar, with things like integrated garbage
collection.
The build system used in XDE and the D-machines is extremely powerful. Builds were
completely
distributed across many servers with the distributed build system managing the packaging
and
dependencies.
9:06 a.m.
(*) The original Smalltalk prototype was written in
BASIC on a Data
General Nova. It wasn't very fast.
Wow. Does this code exist anywhere?
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Just another Sojourner of the Dispersion (1 Peter 1:1) ---------------------
3106
days inactive
3106
days old
6 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
derschjo＠gmail.com -
isking＠uw.edu -
lproven＠gmail.com -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au