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Aucbvax.4921 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Mon Nov 2 19:25:19 1981 [Taft at PARC-MAXC: Re: The Alto User's Handbook] >From FURUTA@WASHINGTON Mon Nov 2 19:13:56 1981 Mail-from: ARPANET host PARC-MAXC rcvd at 2-Nov-81 1447-PST Date: 2 Nov 1981 14:42 PST From: Taft at PARC-MAXC Subject: Re: The Alto User's Handbook In-reply-to: FURUTA's message of 23 Oct 1981 1607-PDT To: Richard Furuta <FURUTA WASHINGTON AT> cc: jeff at WASHINGTON, Dake, Swinehart, Lampson, Taylor, Taft

Your message announcing the availability of the Alto User's Handbook received rather wide distribution (for example, I believe it appeared in the WorkS digest). I would appreciate it if you would convey the following clarification to Editor-people and any other lists you know about to which your original message was distributed.

While the Alto User's Handbook has indeed been cleared for distribution outside Xerox, it has not been brought out as a PARC external report. Our present supply of Handbooks is limited, and we do not have the resources to satisfy the large demand that would be generated by a public release.

Our past practice has been to sell Handbooks, at cost, to organizations that have Altos (principally at CMU, MIT, Stanford, and University of Rochester). But even this is ending, since we are no longer actively developing or maintaining Alto software at PARC; consequently, we are unlikely to reprint the Handbook again.

People who do not have Altos may be interested in more general technical reports on the Alto and Alto-based software, available in the open literature. The most comprehensive report on the architecture of the Alto itself is "Alto: a personal computer", which appears in the recently-published second edition of "Computer Structures: Principles and Examples", edited by Siewiorek, Bell, and Newell (McGraw-Hill). Additional good sources of papers relating to the Alto and follow-on machines include the last two years' SOSP proceedings and several issues of CACM.

We have published a number of PARC external reports on Alto-based systems. These are available on request, though again we are unable to satisfy an enormous demand. Many university and company libraries subscribe to the PARC report series, so you may be able to find copies in your library.

Ed Taft Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC

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