2 ms·
I'll second eschaton's comment about preserving these old documents. Al Kossow has already preserved a lot of Alto documents at bitsavers [1] and I've found the
by kens 10y ago
I'll second eschaton's comment about preserving these old documents. Al Kossow has already preserved a lot of Alto documents at bitsavers [1] and I've found them extraordinarily useful for understanding how the Alto works.
[1] The Alto docs are at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ - I recommend the hardware reference (AltoHWRef.part1.pdf ) and the schematics (schematics/)
The Mesa manual mentioned earlier is at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/CSL_79-3_Mesa_Language_Manual_Version_5.0_Apr79.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/C...
- Animats 10y agoThat's exactly the version of the Mesa manual I have, so that's been preserved. Nobody seems to be very interested in early UNIVAC mainframe stuff, which is most of what I have.
- kens 10y agoWell, I'd like to see the UNIVAC stuff preserved, even if it doesn't have the name recognition of, say, IBM or Xerox. Maybe I could write a blog post about UNIVAC some day - do you have anything interesting I could write about?
- rst 10y agoKossow does collect Univac mainframe stuff, though there are gaps. (Last I checked, bitsavers didn't have any Flow-matic docs, which is frustrating considering that language's historic importance -- though whatever exists would be a couple of decades older than the Alto.)