3 ms·
Xerox SDD and the Star were tasked with turning PARC's research into a product. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/ and they
by bitsavers 4y ago
Xerox SDD and the Star were tasked with turning PARC's research into a product.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/
and they did it slightly ahead of Apple but the big difference was their use
of PARC's strongly typed programming language (Mesa) and its single address
space 16 bit microcoded processor instead of something that was HP-like (PASCAL and segmented multitasking).
I was extremely lucky to have stumbled upon boxes of SDD documentation and source listings in the warehouse of a silicon valley surplus store that cleaned out the SDD building in Palo Alto in the 80s to get much of the documentation that is in that directory on bitsavers. More than you ever wanted to know about Mesa can be found in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/ Additional history of Mesa can be traced back to SAIL and SRI, but not all of that is on line yet.
also, see comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040397