DistOS 2019F 2019-09-16

Readings

The Alto:

• Thacker et al., "Alto: A Personal computer" (1979) (archive.org)

Notes from class

The Alto
--------

* what were the "emulators"?
* technology?

The alto was the realization of Engelbart's vision (well, start of it)

The big inventions
* ethernet (LAN)
* laser printer
* GUI
* object-oriented programming (not first, but...smalltalk!)

Used other cool things
* raster displays
* mouse


Innovation started bottom-up
 - because the hardware was so weak

Xerox gave us desktop publishing
 - but Apple ran with it

laser printers require many many more "pixels" than screen displays
 - 300dpi+ versus 72dpi or less
 - so they also had to figure out how to handle the ridiculous memory requirements of laser printing

Why is the Alto relevant to this course?

(did they build a distributed OS?)