Slashdot Mirror
Check Out the Source Code For the Xerox Alto
jfruh writes The Xerox Alto is a computer legend: it was never sold to the public, but its window-based OS was the inspiration for both the original Mac operating system and Windows. Now you can check out its source code, along with code for CP/M, a similarly old school (though not graphical) operating system.
Here you go http://xeroxalto.computerhisto...
where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Yeah, we know. We knew a week ago.
ImpulseTracker had its source released.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
But still seriously cool. Between this, the entire linux kernel, and DOOM, there is a lot of neat code online to analyze.
Reading code is to coding as reading books is to writing. Essential.
This is a dupe.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
LOL -- and a bit of Digital Research cluelessness from the past as well.
Yes.
Oh, get over yourself. CP/M was 1975 for god's sake. In the same time period (and until substantially later), Unix filenames were limited to 14 characters. A diskette held 243 kB. Unix and CP/M didn't hold back anybody, you idiot. They opened the way.
BTW, people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles. They don't have a clue how command lines operate. Point and click is about the limit of their brainpower.
What did YOU give the world in 1975?
You are comparing CP/M-80 with Apple DOS? Remembering that CP/M-80 was available, um, 3 years before the Apple computer?
CP/M-80 was portable, with instructions on how to add a BIOS and relocate the OS -- didn't this take until Apple DOS 3.2? Oh, a separate BIOS was never done so the only computer it would work on was the Apple ][?
And, it was somehow CP/M-80s fault that Microsoft used it as a model?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles. They don't have a clue how command lines operate.
Grandpa, you've lost your tab completion again! Whatever will we do...
In my day, we had to escape spaces in the snow, uphill, both ways!
So, how do you really feel? Sure, Apple was progressive, no one will argue that... The first decent version of DOS (3.x) came out in 1984. My memory might be faulty; but, I thought Desqview had some support for long file names (or long descriptions for files in a file manager). Windows 3 had some long description support. LFN showed up in 1994, VFAT in 1995, and FAT32 in 1996. I'm not sure what decades (plural) you're speaking of. CP/M was out in the mid 1970's. It had it's limitations, as you know; but, it served it's purpose. (Full Disclosure: I was introduced to computers on Commodore PET, Apple ][, CP/M, and VAX machines. My first DOS experience was 1986)
"The Xerox Alto is a computer legend: it was never sold to the public, but its window-based OS was the inspiration for both the original Mac operating system" ..
.. "The Alto Operating System (OS) was designed by Butler Lampson, based on Stoy and Strachey's OS6"
Where did you read that?
To be fair, Apple II software ran on various other brands of computers. Which Apple vigorously sued those brands for and drove them out of the market. Apple has always been a company operated primarily by a team of marketers and their lawyers worried about the brand.
BTW, people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles. They don't have a clue how command lines operate.
Or perhaps I just know how to use sed to rename files. I like it when my MP3s have spaces in the filenames, for times when the metadata is ignored.
I used to have a Kaypro 4, though. Its terminal was quite crap, adm3a equivalent IIRC. Watching the screen redraw was horrible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
guess again, early Unix shells had escape key completion
Alto was the inspiration for Mac. Mac was the inspiration for Windows.
Apparently he also suffers from Alzheimers! We replaced his escape completion with tab completion around the same time were replaced his lead dentures!
where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.
The revolutionary Alto would have been an expensive personal computer if put on sale commercially. Lead engineer Charles Thacker noted that the first one cost Xerox $12,000. As a product, the price tag might have been $40,000.
Xerox Alto
Adjusted for inflation, $62,000 for the 1973 prototype and $207,000 for the commercial product.
BTW, people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles. They don't have a clue how command lines operate. Point and click is about the limit of their brainpower.
If the use of spaces make file names and associated meta data more readable, they are doing their job.
The GUI frees the user from the arcane and unforgiving command line argument --- permitting him to focus on tasks that more relevant to his own skill sets and the work at hand. That doesn't make him stupid. It makes him productive.
I don't have many grudges with CP/M, but I remember using PIP, CP/M's file copying utility, and thinking that its command line syntax was utterly stupid. I was a 6 year old kid back then. That's one of the few opinions I've carried for most of my life. Sure, once you tried out the various incantations it'd accept (or read the fine manual), it was something you could learn, and I quickly became proficient, but it was needlessly counterintuitive for no good reason at all. When I first tried using it, I expected something that later tuned out to be the syntax that Unix cp and DOS copy would accept: cp source destination. Somehow that seemed like a natural syntax, even though I used CP/M before I even knew that PC/DOS existed, and I'd have my hands on a Unix machine almost a decade later. I've used CP/M, PC/DOS and MS/DOS, VAX VMS and IBM CP/CMS before Unix in fact :) I still think that Rexx on CMS was very, very cool.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Somehow spaces in file names have not been a problem for my command line use on Unix for many years now, and I don't pay much attention to them. Perhaps, just perhaps, whoever grumbles about that doesn't know any better?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.
While it really is time for GP to get over it, I have to say, 14 characters would be a lot better than 8. You can actually use the name of the application. "Word Perfect" rather than "WORDPERF.EXE" or whatever Wordperfect called their application. 14 characters has way better coverage of possible names than 8.
I encountered CP/M before DEC PDP-11, but when I got to use the latter in the early 80s it was pretty obvious where CP/M got its pip from - and the slash options in various commands - and other stuff.
DEC OS/8 circa 1975 (RX01 floppy drives) (RT-11 pretty much the same) :-)
DK0>pip dk0:=dk1:file.tx
(the extension was only 2 letters
CP/M circa 1977 (Shugart SA800 8" floppy drives)
A>pip a:=b:file.txt
In 1972 all I knew about computers was the HP-2100 mini, operating bare-metal by bootloading each program (one at a time of course) from paper tape. Luckily, our system (a computerized network analyzer for microwave testing) had the luxury of a high speed 300 cps optical tape reader in addition to the 10 cps ASR-35 with the mechanical paper tape reader. The latter was phenomenally reliable though. To my memory, it never glitched once my 6 years with it, but the optical reader was constantly going out of alignment and picked up errors from dust even when perfectly adjusted.
Anyone know what year the Shugart SA800 8" floppy drive was introduced? It's amazingly hard to track down online.
CP/M was written for hobbyists. PIP was from a time when even floppy disks were uncommon. As far as ease of use CP/M beat the daylight out of toggle switches. The issue is that once CP/M became mainstream it was going to be hard to change the syntax. Kind of like MS-DOS using \ for paths and / for switches.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The GUI rarely helps me focus on my tasks, especially with files.
Finding a bunch of files, matching them to a set of parameters and then doing operations on them is not easiest to do with a GUI. It would be wonderful if it were, but its simply not.
Sorry to hear your GUI sucks. Other people don't have your problems however, and they also don't have to look up how exactly you get "find" to do what it supposedly can do.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I've had some fun running CP/M on a system with two 8" floppy drives. One fine day I discovered the BIOS constant table on the particular implementation I had (can't remember the name of the system, though), and started "playing" with it. One bit in one of the constants would force a head load-unload cycle between access to each sector. Formatting a disk sounded like a machine gun with a tad sluggish action :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
> BTW, people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles.
And yet here you are using spaces to communicate. _Exactly_ why we have filenames in the FIRST place instead of using sector numbers.
We don't write nor read (English) with underscores: e.g. "BTW,_people_who_use_spaces_in_filenames_are_imbeciles."
Maybe you should stop being an imbecile and pay attention to how 99% of the rest of the world operates instead of making excuses for a broken OS's filesystem, shell, or GUI. Forcing people to adapt to the computer instead of the other way around is exactly why you should take your own advice: Oh, get over yourself.
> What did YOU give the world in 1975?
Fallacy of Ad Hominem; let's shoot the messenger instead of paying attention to the message.
you're confused and/or ignorant, you seem to only know a few of the many possible current shells
Obviously you know nothing of the power of CLIs. No GUI file manager comes close to the power of bash, find and related tools.
Microsoft has been promising such features for years (and has even improved their own CLI for obvious reasons -- its very useful).
Its not *my* GUI, its any GUI.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Obviously you know nothing of the power of CLIs. No GUI file manager comes close to the power of bash, find and related tools.
Microsoft has been promising such features for years (and has even improved their own CLI for obvious reasons -- its very useful).
Its not *my* GUI, its any GUI.
Obviously you know nothing of the power of GUIs. That's because you are a neckbeard nerd with no clues what happened in the real world of computing for the last three decades.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Never mind; I didn't realize you were a troll.
Feel free to cite anything a GUI file manager can do that a CLI can't do better, besides thumbnailing.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Yeah, I'm a troll - but you still have no clue about GUIs. They can do anything a CLI can - only faster.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.