Text File

Aucbvax.4697 fa.works utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Tue Oct 27 01:11:02 1981 WORKS Digest V1 #24 >From JSol@RUTGERS Tue Oct 27 00:27:16 1981 WorkS Digest Tuesday, 27 Oct 1981 Volume 1 : Issue 24

Today's Topics: Xerox Altos Symbolics LiSP Machines ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 26 Oct 1981 1035-PST From: Tom Wadlow <TAW AT S1-A> Subject: Alto Flamage

Chris Ryland claims that the Alto development and general use held back the development of better things at Xerox. My question is: Compared to what?? The Alto was developed around 1972, and is clearly obsolete today. However, I would still rather have an Alto than the fairly unintelligent terminal I work on today. If Xerox had waited for Dolphins or Stars, their people would be getting them right about now. With the Altos, Xerox has had several years of *very* valuable experience in office information systems. If they had not used Altos, chances are that their people would have spent those years working on 80x24 character terminals and hated it, while Xerox learned nothing.

Another point. While I agree that a Lisp Machine probably provides the best programming environment around today, an Office of the Future is not entirely a programming environment. The Alto got advanced office automation software into the hands of its intended user community: secretaries and managers and other non-programmers. And I strongly suspect that the experience gained from that move is heavily reflected in the design of the Star. The widespread use of the Alto was a necessary step in the development of the current generation of Xerox products, not a hindrance.

------------------------------

Date: 26 Oct 1981 2228-PST From: Chris Ryland <RYLAND SRI-KL AT> Subject: Symbolics; Alto snipe

Symbolics does manufacture a personal workstation; see my previous WorkS message about the Lisp Machine. They will support Ethernet hardware on the next version of their machine (the 3600), but it will speak Chaosnet protocols softwarily (of course, I shouldn't prejudge their longer-range plans about protocols; one can assume they'll attempt to live compatibly with other Ethernet protocols via suitable encapsulation on the 10Mhz ether). Call them in LA if you want more info. (No, I don't get any commissions from them.)

Let me clear up my previous "Alto snipe" lest I appear completely insane. I stated my position about the Alto somewhat provocatively, but I didn't mean to imply that Xerox has made some huge mistake in using the Altos extensively in-house; they never had much alternative (I also wasn't pushing for time-sharing systems, but rather advocating powerful servers for when you need to crunch). What I meant, rather, was that the outside world has always been dazzled by the Altos, which are, when you get down to it, rather "cute". However, their "punch" is fairly minimal, and they have always lacked the kind of comprehensive environment which makes a system such as the Lisp Machine so attractive. For example, although various Smalltalks on various Xerox machines (not copiers; Altos, Dolphins, Dorados) do provide a fairly comprehensive computing environment, they've never had an editor or a mail system in common use built-into the Smalltalk environment. I.e., Altos and Dorados tend to be used as tiny single-user "timesharing" systems, in which you have the usual executive/program dichotomy. (I used Altos enough at MIT to learn to dislike them, though they're wonderful intelligent terminals.)

On the other hand, the Lisp Machine provides a completely homogenous, "vertically integrated" environment, in which the editor, mail system, compiler, network file server (yes, each machine has a file server), network file user, local file system, interpreter, window system, etc., are completely useable at any level by any user (Lisp!) program. The folks who built these machines at MIT (now dispersed to various companies) spent a lot of time making the system software comprehensive and useable.

For example, someone here wrote an Alto Draw equivalent (roughly the same functionality, without all the bells and whistles) on the Lisp Machine in a week of spare time hacking (mostly spent learning the window system); in otherwords, there is a vast range of functionality available through the system software, which is fairly easily extended via Flavors.

This is not to say these machines are without problems. For example, the system, as you boot it up, occupies about 5 megabytes of virtual memory. That's fine, but clearly, you need a good deal of real memory to make things work reasonably (1.5-2 megabytes seems to be comfortable). And, these machines are NOT fast; no one has been able to compare them to other machines to anyone else's satisfaction, but there's a general feeling that they're faster than a KA-10 and 2-3 times slower than a KL-10. They don't do arithmetic very rapidly (an integer add seems to take more than 10 usecs, for example), but this isn't a fair yardstick for their basic speed. A lot of speedup is promised for the Symbolics 3600, esp. in the area of function calling and message passing.

Perhaps I can best summarize this flaming with a suspicion which only time will bear out: to provide the kind of comprehensive computing environment which the Lisp Machines are approaching, you're going to need a heck of a lot of hardware power (virtual memory, microcode space, raw microengine speed, paging disk speed, etc). And I don't think any of the other current offerings come close. I don't mean to say that you can thus write off all the workstations on the market, but that you can't expect them to provide anything else than a bare-bones world, or a fairly tightly-bundled, special-purpose environment (such as the Star). That's sad, because the "real world" seems to be making all the mistakes of yesteryear all over again (it happened with micros and it'll happen many times more), instead of starting with the best that we've got and building from there.

(I forgot to mention the Dolphins: they seem to be fairly good Interlisp engines: Xerox EOS claims they'll be KL-10 speeds or better after some software tuning. However, their major problem, for an experimental environment, seems to be their lack of common bus connectability.)

(Oh yes, though this is getting long-winded, I can't shouldn't slight Xerox: they HAVE built a very good software development environment for Mesa on the Dolphins and Dorados. But I don't think this'll see the light of day for a while, if ever. And, Mesa is a compiled language lacking more modern message-passing concepts (though I did hear that the Star software was built with a Flavor-like package built on Mesa), so you don't get the kind of dynamicity you would with Lisp or Smalltalk.)

------------------------------

End of WorkS Digest ******************* -------

----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.