Allen, thanks for confirming the microcode thing. It certainly wasn't the impression I had gotten from the green book, but history does tend to get cleaned up a

Allen, thanks for confirming the microcode thing. It certainly wasn't the impression I had gotten from the green book, but history does tend to get cleaned up as it is retold. To be fair to the PARC people other people had done Alto clones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ I myself got into a graduate computer architecture course even though I was just an undergraduate so I could design a TTL microcoded Smalltalk computer. I was extremely disappointed to learn this was illegal and seriously considered moving away from Brazil at that time (1983, I think).