Programming for the Alto's Mesa

[Ian S. King]

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:

> > 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_Mesa_Language_Manual_Version_5.0_Apr79.pdf
>
> > ... 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-ProcessesInMesa/Abstract.html
>
> > 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
>
>


-- 
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."