Darkstar: A Xerox Star Emulator | Hacker News Reader

Darkstar: A Xerox Star Emulator

engblg.livingcomputers.org

158 pointspjmlp19 comments

The Living Computer Museum is one of the coolest museums I've ever been to. Computers from as far back as the 60's mainframes kept in working order, and freely usable by the public (though you do have to reserve time on the mainframes iirc). The first time I went there I spent hours programming on a paper terminal, which was just beyond cool to a kid who grew up in the 90s. If you're ever in the Seattle area, definitely don't miss this place.

I really need to head over there. Just found out about it recently.

From the creators of the Star user interface, here's a contemporaneous account of their work, published in BYTE magazine in 1982:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91ca/5fd33d2eb7c7b87f96ae59...

by Dr. David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, and Bill Verplank; Xerox Corporation, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304 and Eric Harslem; Xerox Corporation, El Segundo, CA 90245

About the Authors

These five Xerox employees have worked on the Star user interface project for the past five years. Their academic backgrounds are in computer science and psychology.

"We have learned from Star the importance of formulating the fundamental concepts (the user’s conceptual model) before software is written, rather than tacking on a user interface afterward. Xerox devoted about thirty work-years to the design of the Star user interface. It was designed before the functionality of the system was fully decided. It was even designed before the computer hardware was built. In fact, before we even began designing the model, we developed a methodology by which we would do the design."

Some music to go with that page: http://datassette.net/businessfunk/

upd: and some more: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZt64_XOflk

Also, the name actually refers to the John Carpenter & Dan O'Bannon film! A rather curious early movie for them, considering that O'Bannon went right on to writing “Alien.” Recommended for nerds, I don't even know how to otherwise define the audience. The bomb is cool.

Actually?

He does mention the movie (though it is fairly far down the page).

And I'll throw out another recommendation to watch it as well :)

What an amazing gift to the world. Have literally been waiting for 35 years for something like this. Always wanted to get my hands on an Alto. Thank you so much

Yes, this is pretty cool. Amazing to think you can simulate the hardware in regular code on today's machines to virtualize not just the os but the entire machine from... (it can't be that long ago, can it, 2019-1985, wow!) 35 years ago. I was going to say 20 years ago :-)

I found it ironic that the emulator is written in C#/.NET, which shares some design ideas with Mesa and its linage, namely Mesa/Cedar and Modula-3.

Speaking of Modula-3 lineage, you can get Oberon from the Mac App Store.

It's wonderful that people have put in so much effort to keep this history alive.

Kudos

I worked at Xerox from 1995-2017 and had the opportunity to tour their archived hardware more than once. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to see an Alto or Star actually running. But I did get a chance to use GlobalView, their implementation of ViewPoint for Sun workstations. Performance wasn't great (and even worse on Windows machines) but it was still pretty amazing what you could do.

Did anybody have any luck getting Viewpoint to boot under Mono on Linux? Followed the instructions (set clock back to nov 1990, etc.) and loaded the Viewpoint image and after diagnostics it just flashes MP codes 7 and 323 over and over again.

Interlisp booted and worked, though.

EDIT: was able to get the Viewpoint image to boot by selecting 'Alternate Boot' "Rigid"

How does one actually build this thing (on Windows or Unix)? This might be a simple thing but I have no idea what I'm doing.

On Linux you need mono, nuget and msbuild. I used a recent versions from https://www.mono-project.com/

Then you should be able to do:

    git clone https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar.git
    cd Darkstark
    nuget restore
    msbuild

This should produce a Darkstar.exe below D/bin, which you can execute using "mono Darkstar.exe".

On Windows, if you have Visual Studio, then you can just open D.sln and build the project.

Awesome! Thank you!

I wonder how hard it would be to overcome the licensing issue mentioned.

It's an emulator, and you can try to capture the internal that attempt to check the time limit or check the activation. Knowing when and how that happens, you could hack the code and make it work.

Unfortunately, depending on where you live, it may be illegal to do so or even run software that was changed in that way.

It'd take some research to check who owns the relevant rights, so even finding out who we should ask permission from is tricky.

I tried that with Cyncom Systems' Mantis (a 4GL I first met in the 80's on IBM mainframes), but, it turns out, their versions that can run on MVS 3.8j under Hercules are still supported and cost a lot of money.

Screenshots are beautiful! Really nice design I think.

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