Even if you never touch an Alto (and I hope that you someday can do so!), it's interesting to look at BCPL, an ancestor of C. I learned to read it fairly well when I was maintaining LCM's first Alto. -- Ian
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Paul McJones <p...@mcjones.org> wrote: > > I just looked in some boxes I haven't opened in decades. I have "Mesa > > Language Manual, Version 5.0, April 1979". If the people with the Alto > > need this, let me know. > > It’s been scanned: > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/CSL_79-3_Mesa_Language_Manual_Version_5.0_Apr79.pdf > > > ... Mesa was a hard-compiled language, but it had concurrency, > > monitors, co-routines ("ports", similar to Go channels), strong type > > safety, and a sane way to pass arrays around. ... > > The designers of the concurrency mechanisms (Butler Lampson and Dave > Redell) wrote an excellent paper, which can be downloaded from Lampson’s > web site: > > > http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/23-ProcessesInMesa/Abstract.html > > > Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to hear more about it. > > Thanks to the foresight of Al Kossow and others, the Computer History > Museum has a repository of Alto source code online, including the Mesa > system and some applications such as the Laurel electronic mail client and > the Grapevine distributed mail transport and name service. (The repository > also includes a lot of BCPL and a small amount of Smalltalk.) The > repository is here: > > http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org > > Probably better to start here: > > http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/ > http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html > > > Paul McJones > > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu> Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org> University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
