PERQs and software preservation (was: Xerox Star)

From: Alan Pearson <Alan.Pearson_at_cramersystems.com>
Date: Tue May 29 03:20:35 2001

On Fri, 25 May 2001, R. D. Davis wrote:

> In what way is it ahead of X11 combined with xterms? Graphical-only
> user interfaces are useful for those who don't do much wiht their
> computers, such as those with a few data dozen files here and there,
> who just access the 'net, use a word processor or spreadsheet now and
> then, etc. - such as the typical biz-'droid.

Yup, that's exactly what VP was for, and IMHO it did it way better than
the current set of tools for the masses (Office etc). It kept you well
away from the guts of the machine, there wasn't a command line option
at all - everything that was locally installed was somewhere in the
"Directory" icon, which you opened up and used the click-COPY-click
mouse action to put it on your desktop to use. Piece of cake.

> However, anyone who has lots of data files, programs, scripts, etc.
> needs something more useful that allows more reasonable, e.g.quicker,
> access to their data.

Absolutely, if you were a developer you'd almost never use VP unless
you had to put together a fancy-looking presentation or report for the
boss :-) All my development work was done in the Tajo (XDE) environment
where I had access to a command line (well, as many as I wanted), file
tool, editor, and the usual slew of compiler/binder/debugger tools. On
top of that there was a hefty fileserver somewhere on the West Coast where
we could get hold of the "Hacks" tools. Lovely :)

> the PERQs themselves were great improvements over what I've seen of
> the Xerox systems - truly hackers systems were, and are, the PERQs.

There isn't much difference between my T2 running POS and a Dbox running
XDE, they have the same basic set of tools and utils. Obviously the PERQ
tools are for Pascal and the Dbox's are for Mesa, and the PERQ UI looks
like an XDE Executive full-screened :-) Heck, even the directory names
follow the "{volume}<top>sub>file.ext" format :-)

> Why Word format? Aren't you able to convert it to LaTeX format which you
> can then use something useful like Emacs with?

Ha ha, Word goes to the sad people who occasionally ask me to put stuff
together for them. They can only handle Word, and the customer is always
right ;-) Emacs? Nah, I used to use it at AT&T a long time back but got
fed up of never having it installed as standard on each of the various
development machines I had to use. In the end I was forced to get to grips
with vi simply because it was on every development box, and after that I've
never really seen the point in trying to re-learn all the emacs stuff.
As for LaTeX, that was another thing I never got to grips with. I looked
at it once about 10ish years ago and took a sharp step back when it
seemed to be yet another bunch of *roff-style formatting macros. Again at
AT&T we had to do all our docs on a VT220 using "memorandum macros" which
I found hard to get used to after my spell at Xerox using the Star. Never
really liked seeing all that clutter in my documents, and couldn't be
bothered to run it all through a formatter to see what an approximation
of the end result would look like on a VT220. I know I'm just asking to
be flamed here, but I never saw the point of the whole TeX thing :-)

<ducks to avoid flying furniture>

Al.
Received on Tue May 29 2001 - 03:20:35 BST