Check Out the Source Code For the Xerox Alto 71
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.
Can I haz tem linkz? (Score:1)
Here you go http://xeroxalto.computerhisto... [computerhistory.org]
Mo bettah... (Score:2)
Now we can see (Score:3, Informative)
where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.
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You are wrong here. Have you heard of Charles Simonyi? Google him up and then fix your post.
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Actually, Jobs just brought people over to see the demo. No one actually saw any code.
It's why Woz had to invent (and patent) "regions" which was needed because it's the way to handle overlapping windows. (Woz got in a plane accident a short while later where he supposedly told Jobs when he visisted, "Don't worry, I didn't forget regions").
It was only after it was all said and done did someone from Xerox tell Woz their Alto didn't have overlapping windows.
Re:Now we can see (Score:5, Informative)
it wasn't woz.
it was bill atkinson.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt&topic=QuickDraw
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Moderation misclick; please mod parent up. Folklore is always a good read!
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It was only after it was all said and done did someone from Xerox tell Woz their Alto didn't have overlapping windows.
I thought Alto had anything that the software running on it had? There was Alto SW running in Cedar, but Smalltalk, for example, was completely independent, as far as I know (even with its own microcode).
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Actually, Jobs just brought people over to see the demo. No one actually saw any code.
Actually, according to Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age [amazon.com], Xerox management instructed their developers to give Jobs a copy of the code. Which they did under protest, pointing out that Xerox were basically handing over the "crown jewels".
Re:Now we can see (Score:4, Funny)
Ideas come cheap. (Score:3)
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 [computerhistory.org]
Adjusted for inflation, $62,000 for the 1973 prototype and $207,000 for the commercial product.
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Yeah, we know. (Score:1)
Yeah, we know. We knew a week ago. [slashdot.org]
in other ancient software source news (Score:2)
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Yes. [z80.info]
Dup (Score:3)
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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.
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Don't forget the "Ancient Unix" source.
Though with the SCOundrels' demise, it may not be available any more.
CP/M source code (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL -- and a bit of Digital Research cluelessness from the past as well.
Re:CP/M needs to buried ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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!
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guess again, early Unix shells had escape key completion
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Apparently he also suffers from Alzheimers! We replaced his escape completion with tab completion around the same time were replaced his lead dentures [mountvernon.org]!
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you're confused and/or ignorant, you seem to only know a few of the many possible current shells
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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> 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
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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?
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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.
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CP/M needs to die in a fire, and be buried, never to be remembered where it belongs.
That stupid piece-of-shit OS couldn't have more then 8.3 characters in filenames when Apple DOS 3.3 had 30 characters (including spaces!); Apple ProDOS had 15 characters the latter which even had sub-directories!
Good bye and good riddance to CP/M -- the OS that held Microsoft, MSDOS, and Windows back for decades. Even _today_ you _still_ see Windows using 8.3 filenames in Windows\System32 !?
I'm a bit lost on how CP/M held back MS, since MSDOS was never compatible with CP/M, and MS choose to stay with the 8.3 filename for as long as they did. If you want to get mad, get mad at MS for not forward thinking when they bought QDos from Seattle Computing and not changing the filename limitation. Shit, get mad at Seattle Computing for putting a 8.3 limitation in QDos, since by your statement it isn't MS's fault that they left things as they are.
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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 expect
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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 (on
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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.
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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 :)
Xerox Alto window-based OS? (Score:1)
Where did you read that?
Dealers of Lightning Re:Xerox Alto window-based O (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Not quite (Score:1)