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livingcomputermuseum / ContrAlto

This repository contains the source code for Living Computers: Museum+Labs's Xerox Alto emulator, ContrAlto.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Oberon vs Alto #13

Open ghost opened 5 years ago

ghost commented 5 years ago

Sorry if this sound noobish

Did ETH Zurich's Oberon project kind of adopted a lot of ideas from Alto? They have a very good Win application emulator. Could ContrAlto be implemented to use Oberon's Win GUI?

tommythorn commented 5 years ago

Wirth interned at PARC, so YES. He writes something to the extent of wanting such a computer for himself.

Tommy

On Jun 12, 2019, at 21:34, Rastko notifications@github.com wrote:

Sorry if this sound noobish

Did ETH Zurich's Oberon project kind of adopted a lot of ideas from Alto? They have a very good Win application emulator. Could ContrAlto be implemented to use Oberon's Win GUI?

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

tommythorn commented 5 years ago

For the second part, no, there no need or benefit. There are already good simulators for both and they two architectures have nothing in common.

Tommy

On Jun 12, 2019, at 21:34, Rastko notifications@github.com wrote:

Sorry if this sound noobish

Did ETH Zurich's Oberon project kind of adopted a lot of ideas from Alto? They have a very good Win application emulator. Could ContrAlto be implemented to use Oberon's Win GUI?

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

tommythorn commented 5 years ago

Correction: I wrote interned but meant visited — the account can be found with a trivial search:

https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/wirth_1025774.cfm “In 1976, influenced by his exposure to the new workstation technology he used while on a sabbatical leave at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he led a project at ETH to build a new graphical workstation. Named Lilith, it was a complete computing environment, ...”

Tommy

On Jun 12, 2019, at 21:34, Rastko notifications@github.com wrote:

Sorry if this sound noobish

Did ETH Zurich's Oberon project kind of adopted a lot of ideas from Alto? They have a very good Win application emulator. Could ContrAlto be implemented to use Oberon's Win GUI?

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

ghost commented 5 years ago

Yeah, potatoe, potatoe. The Wikipedia article describes it as a "sabbatical". Go figure.

Thanks. I was checking out BravoX in the ContrAlto, and it dawned on me. The bitsavers PDFs need to be optimized though, they are way too heavy to navigate.