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Xerox Alto Emulator

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158 pointshsnewman47 comments

People talking about the Xerox Star are mostly correct, but the statement that "by that time most of the PARC researchers had long since left Xerox" is quite wrong. Star was announced April 1981, and a couple PARC guys (Belleville, Tesler) had left or would soon, but it was certainly not "long since."

I just gave a talk at the Vintage Computer Federation West about a week ago, about my book [1]. There's a photo of a guy playing MazeWar on the cover, and it was taken November 2020 on a working Alto (restored by a guy from the Living Computer Museum, actually!)

I was part of Star, and I wrote the book as a novel mainly so you could see how something like that happens. None of the characters have hindsight, which is a flaw with most histories. And they have real lives outside of Xerox.

We did run XDE on our Altos. It was written entirely in Mesa.

[1] www.albertcory.io

I so rarely get to bring this up, but here's picture of my mom and her Star workstation circa 1983 or so: https://honeypot.net/images/mom-and-star.jpg

She was Wire Chief for the Burlington Northern railroad, and they used that to manage all the systems that keep trains running.

As a side note, I'm always a little shocked when I learn of workplace sexism. When I was a kid, this is what I thought programmers looked like. I was happy to learn that I could be into computers, too.

But she's so young!

Congratulations to her and you.

It's a very different experience than I expected. When I think of the Alto I think of a windowing operating system but this boots into a command line. I've tried out most of the available disks but haven't yet found one that feels like a predecessor to the Apple Lisa.

It's a great project that is really well done, it's the actual experience of the Alto that surprised.

Welcome to the Alto - that is exactly how it worked. There's no "desktop environment", as they were just beginning to figure out how to make applications with windows, icons, mouse cursor, etc. The closest to what you expected to see is probably the Smalltalk environment.

The other part of this is that it's been dramatically overstated how much Apple "took" from Xerox. This issue of BYTE (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02) has awesome details on the development of the Mac (and a bit on the Lisa).

EDIT: wording

That BYTE issue is so incredibly fascinating. Thanks a lot for posting it. The in-depth interviews with Hertzfeld, Atkinson, Jobs, a diagram of the Mac's memory map (page 40), a block diagram of the Mac hardware (page 36), etc.

It also reminds me that computer magazines were ~500 pages when I was a kid.

Personally I can't believe how many of those pages I actually read and processed.

It makes me reflect that a lot of what I'm doing on the web these days really is reading, even though it doesn't involve books, and is comparatively technical/informational.

Those mags were fun though, and I remember reactions from "check out how many stars they gave Turbo Pascal" to "what a goofy author photo" to "somebody wrote in with a great system script" to "oh there's an obscure game company in Vermont still writing arcade titles for dad's office computer" :-)

Yeah that issue is a masterpiece.

You should also check out the BYTE Smalltalk issue:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

I think you're thinking of the Xerox "Star", not the "Alto":

http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html

Great link. This is a super interesting write up on the development of the Darkstar emulator, complete with many screenshots: https://engblg.livingcomputers.org/index.php/2019/01/19/intr...

"Someone" should make a scaled model of the 6085 (Daybreak) and stuff a darkstar emulator in there.

ADD: I cry salty tears that I didn't make it to The Living Computer Museum before they closed.

LCM isn't gone, just hibernating.

I never understood why Paul Allen didn't secure LCM's continued existence when he knew the end was near. It must have been easily within his means.

I'd like to point out that LCM has been offering guest logins to vintage computers all along. Some hardware, some emulated.

https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S... https://wiki.livingcomputers.org/doku.php

You are right, I thought the Star was just the commercialized version of the Alto. The Star looks much more like the Xerox Docutech that I got to use a little bit in school.

The Xerox Star is the machine that had a direct influence on the look of the Lisa software.

The Star was Xerox's big swing to try and enter the exploding business computer market.

Xerox assembled a huge team of software engineers to build a networked office system based on the initial research from PARC, but by that time most of the PARC researchers had long since left Xerox to join the rest of the industry.

The Star was the result of that effort, released the same year as the IBM PC, but it was a flop.

The Star and the Lisa were similar in that they're both the opposite of the "start small, do one thing really well, and iterate" methodology. Both were impressive in the long list of features they tried to introduce all at once, and both ended up as not very good systems.

I didn't realize that Star and PC were released together - what a contrast! Unfortunately the Star was too closed and too expensive to succeed, but it also doesn't seem that Xerox had the culture to do it any other way.

Xerox continued being active in this field for a long time and showcased some amazing work on visualizing and navigating ordered graphs with 3D graphics (can't find the article I'm afraid) which were way ahead of the time.

I'm not sure about the Xerox Star being "too closed" to succeed; I believe it incorporated Ethernet networking (another PARC innovation).

Upon release, the IBM PC was not PC compatible, as the not-quite-ISA was 8 bits, only a single interrupt controller, the power connector was not ATX (neither was the motherboard). Nobody's monitor was multisync...

Compatibility wasn't a thing.

(So ironic, it must have been intentional: the BYTE issue featuring "Standards" as the theme has the Apple Lisa and Apple II on the cover:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-02

How do you mean that? The IBM PC was not “PC compatible” because it defined what “PC compatible” meant. The 8bit bus it had is what became ISA, ATX was the successor to AT, which came from the IBM “Advanced Technology” PC, in a sense the grandchild of the original IBM PC (with the XT in between).

I feel like there is a meaning to your comment that I’m missing, do you mean that the PC wasn’t compatible to anything, because it was what defined compatibility, and still it was successful (because everyone copied it, hence “compatible”)?

The IBM 5150 Personal Computer isn't the same beast that we refer to as "PC compatible".

It was a barely-16-bit computer, no protected mode, funky connectors for the keyboard (no mouse, of course), the interrupt vectors were wired up wrong... the joystick ports... no real-time clock, system configured with DIP switches instead of BIOS, floppy drives were you could buy it without floppy disks, boot directly from ROM into Microsoft BASIC and just use the cassette recorder as mass storage, the power supply was underpowered, the expansion cards were only 8-bit (in part because the 8088 CPU I/O was only 8-bit)...

IBM got from a design to actual product in the retail channel in some ludicrously short period of time, like nine months for this baby computer.

The "PC" converged onto a set of standards. But if you manage to bring home an original IBM PC, you might be surprised at some of the work you will need to get it up and running.

Sorry for being confusing.. I have been digging in and refreshing my memories of that first and second wave of small computers in the early 1980s.

It's a bit churlish to knock the IBM PC, the box that launched a thousand clones. The computer came with BIOS listings and schematics of the motherboard!

It's just that, as built, that first incarnation of the IBM PC was a kludge. A brilliant kludge, but in truth a hack designed to be replaced in a year or two. At the time, there were very low expectations regarding "open" versus "closed" systems. At least in my group of computer ah, enthusiasts. Rather than an S-100 passive backplane, where you can swap out all modules, you had storage and video display in one smaller box. With the printer, a RAM card, and the floppy controller, you had two or three slots...

High end video display terminals in 1980 could be expanded by installing big cards into a rack behind the CRT display. Then they could run with all processing locally!

You are likely thinking of the Xerox Star aka the Dandelion which was a product of Xerox Business Systems (a spinoff from the PARC work). I didn't look too closely but if one of the packs has XDE on it (the Xerox Development Environment) then you'll get the same windows experience that was demonstrated to Steve Jobs back in the day. I'm pretty sure you could run XDE on the Alto (my wife worked at XBS while I was at Sun and there was a lot of cross mingling of technical people at various social events but my memories of exactly what the Alto was capable of are more limited.) We had a get together once over at the office and booted mazewar on six or seven Altos and that was a lot of fun.

You're thinking of the Xerox Star, not the Alto. An Alto running Smalltalk had a windowing environment, but not what you're used to. The Star had a full WIMP system with desktop metaphor, also not one you'd be used to but very powerful and intuitive.

folklore.org has some interesting bits on the evolution of the Lisa interface:

1. Hertzfeld says that Steve Jobs saw Smalltalk rather than the Alto or Star GUI:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_...

Larry Tesler and others moving from Xerox to Apple is perhaps a more direct path for technology transfer. And of course the Star actually shipped two years before the Lisa.

2. The evolution of the GUI itself is particularly interesting, showing the appearance of the menu bar/pulldown menus and Mac-style scroll bars:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born....

Apparently Jobs gets credit for the extensive use of rounded rectangles:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

3. Apparently Bill Atkinson was inspired by MIT's Dataland to implement a spatial layout based Lisa Filer

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Rosings_Rascals....

#3 contains a bit of information I had Google'd for in vain some months ago: Who came up with the name "Finder"? It was, apparently, Bud Tribble.

another one was BLIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1XXvSaVUQ also mentioned in The History of Unix, by Rob Pike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs

then there was Star

Past related post about the Windows-only version of this:

Simulating a Xerox Alto with the ContrAlto Simulator: Games and Smalltalk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769635 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)

(That 1 comment is no good but Ken's article is, typically, fabulous.)

The Mesa language wikipedia entry is very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language)

Missile Command 3.0 by Avadis Tevanian, Jr.

That was a shock for the first command I ran!

That actually makes a bit of sense. NeXT (which reverse bought and absorbed Apple) was a weird pragmatic/bastard Smalltalk on top of Unix type system. To see that Avie hard worked on smalltalk (as well as microkernels) isn't a shock to me.

I doubt that Missile Command was written in Smalltalk, probably in BCPL or Mesa like most of the software for that machine was.

EDIT: http://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/wp-content/uploads/20...

"Avie Tevanian: In undergrad school I did something strange-I studied with TV in the background. I remember they had a lab that was mostly for grad students, but they let me in. For computers back then, they had Xerox Altos, which later inspired the Macintosh, and I'd write games while watching 1V. I'd write my own games, and I created my own versions of Defender and Missile Command as an exercise. My Macintosh versions of those two games are still out there, free on the public domain. Missile Command's actually not too bad - it teaches valuable lessons about survivability in a nuclear holocaust."

Brings back lots of good memories. Did some of my high school homework on the Alto -- I remember one teacher writing on one of my essays "Cool typewriter" (he'd of course never seen a laser printer, so couldn't imagine what dover output was).

I wonder what the Xerox of today is. Something with AR/VR maybe? Or maybe an AI company?

microsoft. maker of drab and mundane on-prem office automation machines that generate more problems than they solve and are cursed the world over during their frequent and often humorous malfunctions.

ms research (who do really cool stuff) is their xerox parc

The Xerox/AT&Ts of today, as those of the past, are the big tech monopolies (roughly FAANG + Microsoft).

I work at xerox PARC and we do IoT. Another group does 3d printing and others are doing various types of engineering and ai/ml.

Is there a group working on 3d printing artificial muscles?

Boston Dynamics.

It would be nice if I knew the Star command lines to get the games disk to work. dir, ls, catalog, all don't work.

How does networking work? Can you create a network Altos, any network apps? like talk or finger?

Oh wow, you hit on a major topic in my book [1]. The Altos were all networked, via 3 MB Ethernet. MazeWar was a networked game (or "MMOG" in modern parlance) and it's on the cover of the book. In the book they spend quite a bit of time talking (and trashing, for some old school folks) how Ethernet worked.

I actually don't remember any live chat apps, but that doesn't mean there weren't any; there probably were. We relied on email mostly.

[1] https://www.albertcory.io

I read the parent post as asking whether emulators can be networked together.

Oops. Sorry.

Wow this is pretty cool. I wonder how different the native github version performs.

The native version is written in C#, there is another emulator [1] that will run on more systems.

[1] https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator

That is not how you announce an emulator on HN. You must say: "How to build your own Xerox Alto Workstation".

I wasn't announcing it, it was simply a interesting site.

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