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> Good enough to be used as personal workstations > for what were the first DTP systems. If you're referring to Star on the D-series, that was written in Mes
by kps 13y ago
> Good enough to be used as personal workstations
> for what were the first DTP systems.
If you're referring to Star on the D-series, that was written in Mesa, which did not have GC.
Alto system software was written in BCPL, which did not have GC (or much else).
Bitsavers has a good deal of the documentation for these systems.
- pjmlp 13y agoMesa was followed by Cedar, which used reference counting with GC for collecting cycles. Not to mention the Interlisp systems as well.
- kps 13y agoMesa, Interlisp, Smalltalk each had their own instruction sets, effectively VMs, which were written by hand. The D-machines' native instructions were wide words with multiple dedicated timesliced hardware 'threads'. The interpreter ran in one 'thread' and core system functions, also handwritten, ran in the others. It's never turtles all the way down. (I currently own a Dandetiger and two Daybreaks.)
- pjmlp 13y agoThanks for the info, I never saw one such system live, just a few papers about them, so some wrong info on my side. Still if those systems had become mainstream surely there would have been an investment making them run as fast as possible. After all, Hotspot is a consequence of an commercialization attempt of such systems.