Stanford had several Alto machines, but they didn't have Smalltalk, due to some licensing issue. They just ran standalone Mesa programs. When I was at Stanford, few people wanted to use the obsolete Altos, so time on them was available. So I did a small project on them.
Bravo was used as both the text editor and the word processor. The file format was plain text, then a control-Z, then the formatting info. The compiler stopped at control-Z. So you could use bold and italic in your programs, and make the source code look good.
As in the picture shown, the Stanford machines had the keyboard and display on top of the computer. This isn't required, and it's really annoying to type on. The keyboard is great; it's a massive casting around clicky keys.
Altos talk PUP, Parc Universal Protocol, over 3MB coax ethernet. Stanford had gateways to connect this to the wider world.
I think I still have some of the Alto manuals.
The vision statement for the Dynabook is in "Personal Dynamic Media"[1] This is worth re-reading every few years.
I just looked in some boxes I haven't opened in decades. I have "Mesa Language Manual, Version 5.0, April 1979". If the people with the Alto need this, let me know.
If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far less buggy. Mesa was a hard-compiled language, but it had concurrency, monitors, co-routines ("ports", similar to Go channels), strong type safety, and a sane way to pass arrays around. In the 1970s.
(I should donate this stuff to the Computer Museum. I just found the original DEC Small Computer Manual, many 1960s UNIVAC mainframe manuals, and a reel of UNIVAC I steel magnetic tape.)
I'll second eschaton's comment about preserving these old documents. Al Kossow has already preserved a lot of Alto documents at bitsavers [1] and I've found them extraordinarily useful for understanding how the Alto works.
Kossow does collect Univac mainframe stuff, though there are gaps. (Last I checked, bitsavers didn't have any Flow-matic docs, which is frustrating considering that language's historic importance -- though whatever exists would be a couple of decades older than the Alto.)
Well, I'd like to see the UNIVAC stuff preserved, even if it doesn't have the name recognition of, say, IBM or Xerox. Maybe I could write a blog post about UNIVAC some day - do you have anything interesting I could write about?
Maybe Modula-3 is too distant from Mesa to make this a valid point, but if not, there's a discussion to be had about why the Mesa-influenced Modula-3 (or the arguably essentially similar Ada) didn't sweep all before it in the 90s.
Is it that the "small set of sharp tools" provided by C, and the "safe and somewhat onerous discipline" provided by Modula-3 represent two points on an evolution that's converging towards the ideal systems programming language? Or maybe the language level is the wrong level at which to be considering this, as if we were analyzing prose at the level of phonemes?
Many of the Mesa researchers left Xerox PARC to join DEC.
There they created Modula-2+ with input from Niklaus Wirth that had created Modula and Modula-2 after his sabatical year at Xerox PARC.
Modula-2+ eventually became Modula-3, which was used for creating Spin OS, distributed objects network protocols and other interesting goodies.
Meanwhile at Xerox, Mesa evolved into Cedar. Niklaus Wirth on his second visit learned about this new system and created Oberon when he returned to ETHZ.
Oberon then gave birth to Oberon-2, Active Oberon and Component Pascal. The Gadgets framework in version System3 was great for a mid-90's workstation OS.
Nowadays I would say that C# is the spiritual successor of Modula-3, with Singularity, Midori and now .NET Native.
With Go taking the role of spiritual sucessor of Oberon.
Everyone should try to delve into books and papers from Burroughs, Xerox PARC, ETHZ, UK Royal Navy, DEC for an alternative view of doing systems programming the right way.
No, it's that Compaq bought DEC, and then HP bought Compaq, and that ended the DEC Systems Research Center in downtown Palo Alto. That's where most Modula-3 development took place.[1]
Lucky HP has kept all DEC stuff alive, so anyone that wants to delve into Modula-2+, Modula-3 and everything that was built with them just needs to dive into the HP Labs repository.
Stanford had several Alto machines, but they didn't have Smalltalk, due to some licensing issue. They just ran standalone Mesa programs. When I was at Stanford, few people wanted to use the obsolete Altos, so time on them was available. So I did a small project on them.
Bravo was used as both the text editor and the word processor. The file format was plain text, then a control-Z, then the formatting info. The compiler stopped at control-Z. So you could use bold and italic in your programs, and make the source code look good.
As in the picture shown, the Stanford machines had the keyboard and display on top of the computer. This isn't required, and it's really annoying to type on. The keyboard is great; it's a massive casting around clicky keys.
Altos talk PUP, Parc Universal Protocol, over 3MB coax ethernet. Stanford had gateways to connect this to the wider world.
I think I still have some of the Alto manuals.
The vision statement for the Dynabook is in "Personal Dynamic Media"[1] This is worth re-reading every few years.
[1] http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf