On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Chuck McManis wrote:
> I'm not familar with the Terak and PERQ but I am intimately familiar with
> the Star and the Alto. My wife was the Network Services Architect for
> Xeroxes Office Systems Business Unit during the Star's heyday. The fact was
> that the Star was sold as a dedicated word processor. A visual typewriter
> if you will on the same price sheet as the memory writers I believe. Now
Yes, Xerox is famous for mismarketing, but are you saying that a
mouse-driven bitmapped networked 8010 isn't a workstation because of where
it was on a price sheet?
> tahoe (later named the Xerox Development Environment (XDE)) ran on
> Dandelions (aka the 8010 series) but it wasn't sold to third parties.
> Later during the Daybreak years Mesa (waayy cool language BTW) was
> ported to Suns and Intel architectures. I don't believe the Alto ever
> escaped PARC as more than a research tool for some folks.
I forget the number: either 1000 or 2000 Altos were made and "seeded"
various universities. Probably made a bigger dent than the Sun 1, and
much earlier.
> The "PERQ page" asserts the claim to first graphics workstation, I'm sure
Probably true if you ignore the Alto. And the Terak was a PDP-11/03 with
a bitmapped display around 1979/1980 IIRC. They were quite popular at
UCSD and UCI, at least.
-- Doug
Received on Wed Jan 20 1999 - 19:07:54 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:07 BST