Xerox Alto Source Code
computerhistory.org
computerhistory.org
The computer itself was a 16-bit word addressed microcoded minicomputer with the microcode in ROM, driving a Signetics ALU. (Most minicomputers of the era were 16-bit word addressed machines.) The portrait-oriented page sized display was pure Xerox PARC; they even made the CRT. There was a mouse, of course, and the original Ethernet interface.
Mesa is a relatively straightforward language. The most unusual feature is that the input to and output from each function call is a tuple of arguments. This input/output symmetry was useful, and has seldom been seen in other languages.
The Bravo text editor was the first WYSIWYG editor with fonts. Amusingly, this was also the programmer's editor. So Mesa programs were written with proportional spacing and boldface where desired. The compiler didn't see any of the formatting. The Bravo file representation was plain text, followed by a control-Z as an EOF, followed by the formatting information. The compiler just stopped at the control-Z.
That explains why the Smalltalk Spacewar source in the Rolling Stone Spacewar article (I'm linking to my own version of it here) wasn't monospaced: http://stuartpb.github.io/spacewar-article/spacewar.html#you...
From my own experience with Oberon derived systems, and all the Xerox PARC documentation that I have from Mesa/Cedar, I became convinced that we really lost with UNIX model becoming widespread into the industry instead of what Xerox was researching.
Xerox had to invent Mesa because they were previously stuck writing BCPL, a predecessor to C sometimes known as the British Cruddy Programming Language.
Xerox's world model was closed systems with a few beautiful applications written by experts. End users were not to be allowed access to the guts of the software. The realization of this was the Xerox Star, which was a nice, and very expensive, world processor with a few additional applications. (Visualize a system that runs Microsoft Office and nothing else.) The idea that ordinary people would write application programs was completely alien to Xerox. Their market was secretaries.
So 95% of corportate desktops? (I guess if you include Outlook and IE in a wider definition of "Office")
I also had access to a Mac, had an HP-9000 unix workstation (running X Windows) sitting on/under my desk, and had some exposure to Smalltalk-80 at the time. What blew me away was how mature and strange the Alto was; it was so obviously advanced, but was so difficult to understand. At that time, it was an 'old' machine, but somehow seemed like it was sent from the future.
This is why when I combine my own experience with Smalltalk and Oberon, coupled with all the Xerox PARC documentation that I can get my hands on, I feel sad that the industry didn't adopt any of the Xerox PARC paradigms.
So here we are, jumping of joy for something like Swift Playground or Bret Victor's demos, when everyone could have had something like that for years now.
The teacher had a dead Cube on his office and NeXT was considered dead by the department.
I tried long to replicate some of the experience with WindowMaker/AfterStep and GNUStep but it never felt like what I could see from the NeXT manuals.
Honestly, the release of this might stir somebody to get one going. It would be a weird beast to emulate though.
http://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html
It says that it is emulating the Nova instruction set - the Alto hardware manual at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/... says that the standard microcode on the Alto emulated the Nova.
One might be able to recover some old species' DNA - it is not enough to clone it back to life.