5 ms·
Both had buttons and a monochrome screen, and ran programs. What got my attention was how slowly text was painted on the screen, in the ad. I wonder if that wa
by ncmncm 4y ago
Both had buttons and a monochrome screen, and ran programs.
What got my attention was how slowly text was painted on the screen, in the ad. I wonder if that was artificial. People used to be weirded out by computers being "too fast". They thought it must be taking a shortcut and not processing everything it ought to. Coders had to insert delay loops so it would look like something was happening. Yes, really true.
My employer in 1982 bought a Xerox CP/M machine, thinking it ought to have some PARC mojo. Probably that one.
- gumby 4y agoBy today's standards it was slow, but the video looked slow to me too. I remember it as faster and I know the last time I typed at one (at the LCM about five or six years ago) it didn't seem that slow to me. If you read Butler Lampson's paper on the design of the Alto you'll see it was an amazing machine. Super screen-oriented (i.e. human-oriented): the bus clock was 3/2 the screen refresh speed, so the majority of the bus bandwidth was spent refreshing the screen! Absurd and crazy at its time, but of course now we realize that it was brilliant. All built out of a handful of MSI and SSI TTL parts IIRC. Actually the paper is by Thacker, McCreight, Lampson and Sproull. Really a great read.
- ncmncm 4y agoIt did a very great deal with amazingly little physical hardware. As much as people complained about its performance, I would have been proud to have designed it.