
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 10: New boards, running programs, mouse problems - dwaxe
http://www.righto.com/2016/10/restoring-ycs-xerox-alto-day-10-new.html
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Animats
They're running Bravo. That's a fun editor. An improvement on most of its
successors.

You edit both programs and documents in Bravo. Programs in Mesa are usually
written in variable-width fonts. (Somehow this never caught on. It looks nice.
I used to bold Mesa keywords.) The file format is plain text, then a
control-Z, then formatting information. The compiler reads up to the control-Z
and stops, thus ignoring the formatting.

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Crosseye_Jack
At the rate they are going they will have python running on it before the year
is out.

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Animats
Won't fit. Max memory is 512KB. Less than an IBM PC.

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Crosseye_Jack
It was more of a "tongue in cheek" comment about how fair they have progressed
with the restoration with how little time they have spent on it (as they are
not restoring this as a full time job).

In other words they are progressing so well they will have python running on
it despite the "limitations" of the Alto just to prove they can even if its
just a simple hello world. I'm not actually expecting them to port python to
it.

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digi_owl
Starting to sound like this poor Alto has been to hell and back.

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rjsw
Or it is a FrankenAlto. I wonder how many different systems the components
have been in.

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ChuckMcM
I think this is more likely. In collecting older computers I've often come
across "complete" systems which were cobbled together from a bunch of
disparate systems of different origins.

Generally this isn't a problem is the person putting together the system is
actually running it, they might do this to keep it running after its
maintenance contract has expired (happened with a lot of VAXes and PDP-11's)
but it is a problem if a scrapper wants to get a premium for a "complete"
system and they don't know if it works or not so they just put "the required
boards/parts" together and call it a system.

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guelo
It seems weird that Alan Kay would have an Alto that is just a jumble of
incompatible parts. And that YC bought a random mouse on ebay and didn't tell
these guys about it.

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ChuckMcM
Actually it doesn't seem that weird to me. I don't recall anyone who bought a
system from Xerox (as I recall they were in house development only and cost
about $75,000 each to produce). But I do remember when they were being
scrapped and the word went out that some ex-Xerox employees were rescuing them
and looking for others to take some. I was sorely tempted to take a Dandelion
machine (this was the mid-range D-machine that I was most familiar with). I
could easily imagine that Alan said "I'll take one" and whomever was
organizing the rescue made sure all of the "parts" were included when it was
long past the time when you could easily boot one up and see if it worked or
not.

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alankay1
Exactly ...

