Text File

Aucbvax.1670 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!BNH@MIT-EECS Fri Jun 12 17:30:48 1981 Xerox star so, enough about the 820. it's out of our class.

Re ability to program star necessary: not necessarily -- all you really need is an interface specification for the graphics, as many applications run on the corporate (remember who this is targeted for) mainframe, and probably will continue to run much better there than on the star. Sure, it would be nice to use mesa, but it's not absolutely for their market. The neat thing about the graphics on it is that it appears to work on a "representational" basis internally, and so to get things down the line to it, you don't have to hack the bit map to produce a chart, just send down a rep-list and let it do the rest. I have no technical people from Xerox who say that it is representational, just my own guess from seeing it and knowing that the output on the print server was much better than the graphics "screen photo" which we can get from the alto to the dover.

Re bigger is better: it is. Managers look at large spread sheets, as the weakest example of this. And remember, Xerox is trying very hard to simulate an entire desk with this thing. This give rise to wanting to see a whole page of text (860-style) on the screen at the same time as your bunch of most-used icons.

Re what is neat about Mesa: I haven't touched the manual since it was given to me in 1979, but as I recall, Mesa implements Public and Private parts of modules, has ports and Joins for them to implement multitasking, allows Catching data when a Signal is generated instead of just getting a condition, has all the usual pascal records and data types and ranges, a little better syntactically and more flexible,... at the time, it looked like an easier-to-understand Green (since Ada). But more importantly, it is implemented in a powerful programmer's system. As the manual says, "Mesa is really a programming system of which the language is but one part." (Caveat: I have never programmed in the language, so this is superficial at best.) Brian (BNH@MIT-ML) -------

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.