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Aucbvax.1693 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!dlw@MIT-AI Sat Jun 13 01:08:42 1981 The nature of personal workstations. From: HOROWITZ at USC-ISIF To: apollo at MIT-AI We are in the process of considering which personal workstations to purchase. Our current leader is the Xerox STAR as we believe Xerox will release Mesa and Smalltalk on the machine. We find the Lisp machines too expensive.

This message illustrates what I think is one of the really important points in our discussions so far. The above message indicates that Horowitz's group has, for some reason, concluded that they want to buy "personal workstations". Having decided that, they are now considering which ones to get. Unfortunately, Horowitz does not tell us anything else, like, WHY they want "personal workstations", and therefore it is difficult to judge whether a Star or a Lisp Machine is better.

Since he mentions Mesa, presumably he doesn't just want to do the OI that the Star can do; he wants to write programs. Indeed, Lisp Machines are more expensive, and maybe are too expensive for anything he wants to do. However, the Star has three disadvntages as a program development system. First of all, Xerox has not said for certain whether they will ever release Mesa and the associated program development software; even if they do release it, they probably will not be interested in supporting it. Their real market for Stars is the OI market, out in the real world, and not a few random researchers here and there. A man-month put into improving the OI software is far more valuable to Xerox then the same man-month put into maintaining the program development system to the point where it can be released to remote users. As far as our discussions on this mailing list go, it should be kept firmly in mind that Xerox's interest in the Star is as an OI system, not a Mesa program-development system. Secondly, even if you did have Mesa and its program development system, the Lisp Machine's language and program development system are far better anyway. Thirdly, the Star's processor doesn't have virtual memory, and so has very severe address space limits.

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