Aucbvax.4697
fa.works
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works
Tue Oct 27 01:11:02 1981
WORKS Digest V1 #24
>From JSol@RUTGERS Tue Oct 27 00:27:16 1981
WorkS Digest Tuesday, 27 Oct 1981 Volume 1 : Issue 24
Today's Topics: Xerox Altos
Symbolics LiSP Machines
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Date: 26 Oct 1981 1035-PST
From: Tom Wadlow <TAW AT S1-A>
Subject: Alto Flamage
Chris Ryland claims that the Alto development and general use
held back the development of better things at Xerox. My question
is: Compared to what?? The Alto was developed around 1972,
and is clearly obsolete today. However, I would still rather
have an Alto than the fairly unintelligent terminal I work on
today. If Xerox had waited for Dolphins or Stars, their people
would be getting them right about now. With the Altos, Xerox
has had several years of *very* valuable experience in office
information systems. If they had not used Altos, chances are
that their people would have spent those years working on
80x24 character terminals and hated it, while Xerox learned nothing.
Another point. While I agree that a Lisp Machine probably provides
the best programming environment around today, an Office of the
Future is not entirely a programming environment. The Alto got
advanced office automation software into the hands of its intended
user community: secretaries and managers and other non-programmers.
And I strongly suspect that the experience gained from that move
is heavily reflected in the design of the Star. The widespread
use of the Alto was a necessary step in the development of
the current generation of Xerox products, not a hindrance.
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Date: 26 Oct 1981 2228-PST
From: Chris Ryland <RYLAND SRI-KL AT>
Subject: Symbolics; Alto snipe
Symbolics does manufacture a personal workstation; see my previous
WorkS message about the Lisp Machine. They will support Ethernet
hardware on the next version of their machine (the 3600), but it will
speak Chaosnet protocols softwarily (of course, I shouldn't prejudge
their longer-range plans about protocols; one can assume they'll
attempt to live compatibly with other Ethernet protocols via suitable
encapsulation on the 10Mhz ether). Call them in LA if you want more
info. (No, I don't get any commissions from them.)
Let me clear up my previous "Alto snipe" lest I appear completely
insane. I stated my position about the Alto somewhat provocatively,
but I didn't mean to imply that Xerox has made some huge mistake in
using the Altos extensively in-house; they never had much alternative
(I also wasn't pushing for time-sharing systems, but rather advocating
powerful servers for when you need to crunch). What I meant, rather,
was that the outside world has always been dazzled by the Altos, which
are, when you get down to it, rather "cute". However, their "punch"
is fairly minimal, and they have always lacked the kind of
comprehensive environment which makes a system such as the Lisp
Machine so attractive. For example, although various Smalltalks on
various Xerox machines (not copiers; Altos, Dolphins, Dorados) do
provide a fairly comprehensive computing environment, they've never
had an editor or a mail system in common use built-into the Smalltalk
environment. I.e., Altos and Dorados tend to be used as tiny
single-user "timesharing" systems, in which you have the usual
executive/program dichotomy. (I used Altos enough at MIT to learn to
dislike them, though they're wonderful intelligent terminals.)
On the other hand, the Lisp Machine provides a completely homogenous,
"vertically integrated" environment, in which the editor, mail system,
compiler, network file server (yes, each machine has a file server),
network file user, local file system, interpreter, window system,
etc., are completely useable at any level by any user (Lisp!) program.
The folks who built these machines at MIT (now dispersed to various
companies) spent a lot of time making the system software
comprehensive and useable.
For example, someone here wrote an Alto Draw equivalent (roughly the
same functionality, without all the bells and whistles) on the Lisp
Machine in a week of spare time hacking (mostly spent learning the
window system); in otherwords, there is a vast range of functionality
available through the system software, which is fairly easily extended
via Flavors.
This is not to say these machines are without problems. For example,
the system, as you boot it up, occupies about 5 megabytes of virtual
memory. That's fine, but clearly, you need a good deal of real memory
to make things work reasonably (1.5-2 megabytes seems to be
comfortable). And, these machines are NOT fast; no one has been able
to compare them to other machines to anyone else's satisfaction, but
there's a general feeling that they're faster than a KA-10 and 2-3
times slower than a KL-10. They don't do arithmetic very rapidly (an
integer add seems to take more than 10 usecs, for example), but this
isn't a fair yardstick for their basic speed. A lot of speedup is
promised for the Symbolics 3600, esp. in the area of function calling
and message passing.
Perhaps I can best summarize this flaming with a suspicion which only
time will bear out: to provide the kind of comprehensive computing
environment which the Lisp Machines are approaching, you're going to
need a heck of a lot of hardware power (virtual memory, microcode
space, raw microengine speed, paging disk speed, etc). And I don't
think any of the other current offerings come close. I don't mean to
say that you can thus write off all the workstations on the market,
but that you can't expect them to provide anything else than a
bare-bones world, or a fairly tightly-bundled, special-purpose
environment (such as the Star). That's sad, because the "real world"
seems to be making all the mistakes of yesteryear all over again (it
happened with micros and it'll happen many times more), instead of
starting with the best that we've got and building from there.
(I forgot to mention the Dolphins: they seem to be fairly good
Interlisp engines: Xerox EOS claims they'll be KL-10 speeds or better
after some software tuning. However, their major problem, for an
experimental environment, seems to be their lack of common bus
connectability.)
(Oh yes, though this is getting long-winded, I can't shouldn't slight
Xerox: they HAVE built a very good software development environment
for Mesa on the Dolphins and Dorados. But I don't think this'll see
the light of day for a while, if ever. And, Mesa is a compiled
language lacking more modern message-passing concepts (though I did
hear that the Star software was built with a Flavor-like package built
on Mesa), so you don't get the kind of dynamicity you would with Lisp
or Smalltalk.)
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End of WorkS Digest
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