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The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
or
Exploring the Ethernet with Mouse and Keyboard
BY
LYLE RAMSHAW
A revision of: A Field Guide to Alto-Land, by ROY LEVIN
This document is for Xerox internal use only
MAY
1981
XEROX
PALO ALTO RESEARCH CENTER
3333 Coyote Hill Road / Palo Alto / California 94304
Raison d'Etre
Are you a programmer? Are you sick of manuals that tell you how to use a software system
without telling you why it behaves as it does? Are you flustrated because you don't know the
unstated assumptions behind the interesting discussions you hear around you? Have you ever
wanted to browse through the source code or the documentation for a program, but couldn't figure
out where to find it? If the answer to some of these questions is "yes", read on! These and other
useful (and occasionally entertaining) tidbits shall be made known unto you.
You will doubtless read many documents while you are at Xerox. A common convention observed in many manuals and
memos is that fine points or items of complex technical content peripheral to the main discussion appear in small type,
like this paragraph. You will soon discover that you cannot resist reading this fine print and that, despite its diminutive
stature, it draws your eyes like a magnet. This document has such passages as well, just so that you can begin to enjoy
ferreting out the diamonds in the mountain of coal.
There is a great deal of useful infOlmation available on-line Oat Xerox in the form of documents and
source program listings. Reading them is often very helpful, but finding them can be a nuisance.
Throughout this document, references to on-line material are indicated by {n}, where n is a citation
number in the bibliography at the end of this document. Standard citations to the open literature
appear as [n).
Reading a document from front to back can be mighty boring. This document is organized so that
you can (supposedly) browse through and read the parts that look interesting. In fact, the current
version of this document is so disorganized that it is not at all clear that there really is a front and a back in the normal
sense! This means that the usual bottom-up approach to documentation (define your terms before
you use them) has been abandoned. Instead, all the relevant terms, acronyms, and the like have
been collected in a glossary at the end. Some information is contained only in the glossary, so you
may want to scan through it later (or now, for that matter). It is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of
computer science, and a modicum of common sense. Don't expect to find terms like "computer" and "network" in the
glossary.
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
2
Alto-Dolphin-Dorado" Land
Behind that inviting screen there lurks a wealth of fascinating history, folklore, and (occasionally)
documented wisdom. However, even the great storytellers of old occasionally forgot that their
attentive audiences included travelers from other lands who were ignorant of the local customs and
traditions. So it was with the Alto gurus. What follows is a transcription of the oral history of the
Alto culture acquired by a relatively recent settler in these parts. It makes no claim to
completeness, balance, or fairness. (A separate document exhibiting these qualities may be found
on {20}.)
Before exploring Alto-land, you should know something about the names of the creatures you will
find there. The prevailing philosophy about naming systems in CSL and SDD is perhaps somewhat
different from the trend elsewhere. While we have our share of alphabet soup (e.g., PARC, FfP,
MAXC, IFS), we are trying to avoid making it any worse. Names for hardware and software
systems are frequently taken from the Sunset Western Garden Book [14]; Grapevine servers are
named after wines; Dorados are named after capital ships; Pilot releases are natned after California
rivers. Personal machines also have names that frequently, but not necessarily, come from the same kinds of sources.
These names are chosen by the machine's owner, and registered with an entity named NetSupport WBST. As this
convention about names does not meet with universal approval, it seems inappropriate to offer a
justification of the underlying philosophy without offering equal time to the opposition. You will
doubtless provoke a far more interesting discussion if you advance your own views on naming to
almost anyone wandering in the corridors. Accordingly, we abandon the topic here and move on to
more concrete matters.
Alto, Dolphin, and Dorado hardware
Most of the offices and some of the alcoves around PARC have personal computers in them of one
flavor or another. The first of these was the Alto. There are more than 1000 Altos in existence
now, spread throughout Xerox, the four universities in the University Grant program (through which
Xerox has given Altos to U. of Rochester, and Altos, Dovers, and IFS's to eMU, MIT, and Stanford), and other
places. In contrast, the Dolphin and Dorado are newcomers to the scene. A Dolphin is somewhat
more powerful than an Alto, and a Dorado is gloriously more powerful. Private ownership of
Dorados is a recent innovation, and has not yet spread very far. Most of us get our fixes of Dorado
time by signing up on lists to share one of the "pool" Dorados.
The Alto hardware
The genus "Alto" comprises two species, imaginatively named Alto I and Alto II, and there are
several sub-species as well. All members of the genus have at least a display, a keyboard, a mouse
with 3 buttons, and a processor/disk cabinet. The front cover of an Alto I cabinet has a ventilation
grill just at the bottom, while on the front cover of an Alto II, the grill goes all the way up to the
disk slot. All Alto I's have a main memory consisting of 64K 16-bit words, called one bank in local
parlance. Most Alto II's are equipped with the extended memory option (XM), and have up to
four banks of memory (that is, 256K 16-bit words). Needless to say, you can do it lot more with
four times the memory.
The first Alto II's made came equipped with a funny keyboard, properly called the ADL keyboard, although sometimes
also simply referred to as the Alto II keyboard An ADL keyboard is larger, and has a different key layout, including
columns of function keys on the left and right. The ADL keyboards were generally reviled, and hence did not stay in
production long. Nowadays, they are pretty rare. If you want to see one, check out Clover's Alto. Don't be confused
by documentation that warns you that keys will be in different places on an Alto II; you can safely ignore these
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
3
warnings unless, God forbid, your Alto II has an ADL keyboard.
The innards of the Alto are revealed in gory detail in a very complete manual {I}. Facts, figures,
specifications, and programming information (at the machine level) are all there. What isn't there is
a bit of the philosophy underlying the machine design and organization. In particular...
1) There isn't much special-purpose hardware in the Alto. Most of the nifty stuff you can
read about in the hardware manual is in fact implemented by microcode. This gives us
considerable flexibility in the way we design software interfaces for experimental devices
and specialized instruction sets. In fact, Mesa and Small talk are implemented almost entirely with
"special" microcode.
2) The display is rather different from a number of other common displays. Instead of
containing a character or vector generator, the display hardware interprets individual bits.
One bit in memory shows up as one dot on the screen. Since the screen is 606 by 808
points, a quick calculation shows that a full-screen display requires nearly half of an Alto I's
memory. For a machine with only 64K of memory, that seems a big price to pay. The
theory is that in exchange for the space we get enormous freedom to experiment with
various strange ways of manipulating the screen.
So much for philosophy-how does it work out in practice? Well, excessive flexibility breeds chaos,
so a number of things have been standardized. All Altos contain a ROM that defines the "normal
emulator" (Le., the standard instruction set) and the standard i/o device interfaces (e.g., display,
disk, ethernet, and so-called "junk i/o"-the keyboard and mouse). The instruction set is derived
from the Data General Nova, though the ilo structure is rather different and several specialized
instructions exist to support various display manipulations. If you have a spare hour or so, read about
BITBLT in {I}. Then try to imagine writing the microcode to implement it Since the microcode for these
standard facilities is blown into a ROM, suggestions for improvements/extensions are treated with
considerable skepticism. Microcode hackers will find the additional 1K control RAM available on
all Altos a reasonably comfortable sandbox in which to play. If you are both a microcode hacker and a
concrete pourer, you can also use a second lK of ROM on Alto II's. A few Alto II's substitute 3K of RAM for the
second lK of ROM, which gives you even more room to play without any need for concrete..
The display has enormous potential, and there are a number of programs around that exploit it in
interesting ways. We also feel compelled to note that at least an equal number of programs still
treat the display as a glass teletype. Home-made cookies require more effort, but they taste a lot
better than the store-bought variety. Fortunately, more and more people are getting into home
cooking.
The mouse has two -obvious properties-it rolls and it clicks. Inside the Alto hardware, the mouse
position and the display cursor position are completely unrelated, but most software arranges for the
cursor to "track" the mouse's movements. The three mouse buttons are named red, yellow, and
blue, even though physically they are nearly always black. This choice was made because not all
mice have their buttons arranged in the same way. On some (older) mice, the buttons are thin,
horizontal bars; the top one is red, the bottom one is- blue. On most mice, however, the buttons are
wide, vertical bars, with red at the left and blue at the right. Some people insist on naming the buttons red,
yellow, and green-perhaps as kids they had strange paintboxes, or were fixated on traffic lights.
A somewhat unusual property of the Alto is that the keyboard and mouse buttons are unencoded;
that is, there is a bit for each key that indicates whether the key is up or down. Many programs
4
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
distinguish between holding a mouse button down and clicking it down and up. Fewer programs
play such tricks with the keyboard, although combinations of keys that would jam a conventional
typewriter are quite meaningful to some programs, c.g., the NetExec. Fortunately, there is standard
software that enables you to treat the keyboard in the usual way if you want to. Note that this "usual
way" involves a feature called infinite rollover that changes your typing style after a while: you can have arbitrarily
many keys depressed at the same time without causing a jam, and without causing any strokes to be discarded. Every
key that goes down counts as a key stroke when it goes down, and when that key comes up again doesn't matter at all.
A few weeks of typing on this sort. of keyboard, and you begin typing common letter clusters such as "ion" with just a
flick of the wrist; after all, if the letters come out in the wrong order on the display screen, you can always edit them
later.
With a personal computer, you are programmer, system hacker, and console operator all rolled into
one. If you don't like the state your program has reached, you can always press the boot button
and start over-an option you rarely have on larger, shared machines. It is a good idea NOT to press the
boot button when disk activity is in progress, however, since you may interrupt the writing of a disk sector halfway
through, thus rendering that sector unreadable. However, the Alto differs from many small computers in
that it lacks those time-honored, nitty-gritty debugging facilities: the console lights and switches.
If things are so screwed up inside that you can't get some sort of (software) debugger running, there
isn't much you can do as console operator. This tends to down-play the operator role and
emphasizes the system hacker role. ("Let's see, if I hit shift-Swat, that will write the core image on Swatee, and
if I then bootload the debugger... fI) It also makes certain kinds of bugs, e.g., those that smash crucial
memory locations in low-core, very difficult to find.
If you have just turned on an Alto and are about to spin up your disk and do some work, it is a good idea to hit the
boot button be/ore your disk comes up to speed: When an Alto is first powered up, it comes up in an unknown state,
and there is some small but nonzero chance that the processor is sitting in a loop just waiting to eat your disk (that is,
write something on it).
Double Disks on Altos
Many Altos in CSL have been equipped with a second disk drive, which either balances on top of
the processor cabinet or sits on some flat surface nearby. The two drives of a double disk Alto can
be used in two different ways: either the two disks constitute separate file systems, or they together
constitute a single, larger file system. It is possible to extend a one disk Alto file system into a two
disk system at any time, but the reverse is not possible. And a two disk system will only operate
when both of its disks are loaded into the drives of a double disk Alto. A double disk machine has
a second little switch hidden at the back of the keyboard, in addition to the boot button. This
switch serves to interchange the roles of the two drives, called DPO and DPl. If you flip this switch
while disk activity is in progress, you will fairly likely get what you deserve: a smashed page on
Scavenger may help you recover.
o~e
or both disks. The
The Dolphin (formerly called the DO)
A Dolphin looks a lot like an Alto II. The biggest difference is that the Dolphin has a nasty
looking piece of solid sheet metal where an Alto has a slot into which you can stick your disk pack.
You see, a Dolphin comes with a Shugart 4000 disk instead of the Diablo 31 disk of the Altos-and
the recording medium of a Shugart 4000 is not removable (well, not easily removable anyway: with the
right tools and expertise, you might swap platters in an hour or so). This makes it somewhat harder to borrow
someone else's Dolphin than it is to borrow their Alto-see the discussion below on Living Cleanly.
Dolphins have various advantages over Alto II's: Mesa programs run significantly faster; long
pointers in Mesa work (making it easier to use lots of memory); the Shugart disk is bigger (two
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
5
partitions); and Pilot runs on Dolphins. Most Dolphins have wide displays, 1024 bits in width
instead of the 606 bits pf the standard Alto-style display. The extra screen space is only available to
programs running in the Pilot world.
The Dorado (very formerly called the D1)
A Dorado doesn't look anything like an Alto, although most Dorados today come equipped with an
Alto-style terminal (display, keyboard, and mouse). In fact, in a return to the ways of the past, a
Dorado's processor is located in a remote, heavily air-conditioned machine room. When the Dorado
was being designed, it was intended and hoped that the Dorado, like the Alto, would live in your office. To prevent its
noise output from driving you crazy, a very massive case was designed, complete with many pounds of sound-deadening
material. These cases are fondly known as APC's, although no one is sure what the letters stand for in the Dorado's
case (see the Glossary). But experience indicated that Dorados run too hot when inside of these cabinets. and the
concept of having Dorado processors in offices has been abandoned. With VLSI and all, there is some hope that the
Dorado's successor (the Dragon?) will once again come out of the machine room and into your office.
Dorados have varying amounts of memory, but at least 512K 16-bit words, or equivalently, 8 banks.
In addition to these oceans of real memory, the Dorado has a fairly whippy processor, a cache, and
a Trident 80 MByte disk; this all adds up to pretty impressive perfonnance. A Dorado is roughly
three to five times faster than an Alto when emulating an Alto, that is. running BCPL. And a Dorado
runs compute-bound Mesa software roughly eight to ten times as fast as an Alto. Because of the
raw power of a Dorado, it is usually the computer of choice for substantial programming projects.
The primary difficulty about Dorados is that there aren't enough of them-yet (and the related fact that
they are rather tricky to build).
Dorado disks can be changed with somewhat greater ease than Dolphin disks, but the process is still
painful enough that changing disks is not the normal mode of operation. The biggest difficulty is
that you must be at the processor to change the disk, and the processor is a long way away.
Subsidiary difficulties are that you must power down a Dorado in order to change the disk pack,
and that T-80 disk packs are difficult to label effectively. As a result, when you borrow a Dorado,
you also need to borrow at least some of the space on that Dorado's local disk: this brings us to
the issue of Living Cleanly.
Living Cleanly: local disks, file servers, and the like
Local disks are very convenient, but not very reliable. It is quite tempting to work along on an
Alto for weeks at a time, without backing up your files on any other medium. You might be able
to do this forever without getting burned. On the other hand, those of us who have been hanging
around here for a while could tell you many sad stories of head crashes and dropped disks, that left
our colleagues (or even ourselves) with disk packs suitable only for wall decorations. In fact, most of
those very disks are now serving as wall decorations. Hence, the principle of clean living: you are living
cleanly if your pulse and blood pressure would remain substantially constant when you are
infonned that your local disk has been degaussed. Make sure that all of the bits you really
wouldn't want to lose are out some file server, such as Maxc or an IFS, where suitable precautions
are constantly being taken by wizards to protect against disk failure. Appropriate use of command file,
dump files. and other automatic aids can make this task easier.
Encouraging clean living has another benefit: shared local disks are only practical if everyone lives
cleanly. The management of the public partitions on Dolphins and Dorados presumes a policy of
clean living: when you are done working on a public partition, you must store away all of your
files on remote file servers. It is polite to delete your files from the local disk as well, to give whoever follows you
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
6
but this is not nearly as critical. If you find that there isn't enough space on a
partition, you are perfectly within your rights to delete the random files that are lying around on
the partition to regain space. And the creators of those files won't mind, it says here, because they
have been living cleanly. In fact, there is an authoritative image of what a "completely clean" public Alto-Mesa 6
more space to play;
partition for a Dorado is out on [Ivy] directory) that accommodate
99% of the document production you have to do. Most of the configuration options aren't even
documented, so it is hard to get enough rope to hang yourself. If you feel suicidal, there are always
wizards about who can answer your every question about Bravo esotcrica. 'fhe net effect is that you spend much
more time composing and much less time compiling.
No one believes Bravo is the ideal solution; indeed, it has a lot of shortcomings that become
evident as you begin to push on it. Nevertheless, it is a· sufficiently large step forward that you will
wonder how you tolerated the old way of doing things. (If this isn't obvious to you after reading
[12] and [13], wait until you've used it for a few weeks.) You will also find that the availability of
multiple fonts, paragraphing, automatic indentation, and other formatting facilities inside the text
editor leads you to make prettier programs as well. It just isn't that much more work to create and
maintain attractive source text, and a simple set of formatting conventions can be a more potent
program documentation aid than comments (see [11] for some examples). There are some operational
annoyances with using Bravo formatting, however. The only program which can interpret Bravo formatting information
and produce corresponding hardcopy is Bravo itself, and it can only do so on one file at a time and rather slowly.
Empress is much faster, but can only handle pre-formatted Press files or simple text (e.g., a sequence of ASCII
characters). There is a Hardcopy subsystem that takes a list of files and feeds them one-by-one to Bravo for hardcopying
(it uses a Bravo macro [13] to eliminate manual intervention), but this is a kludge at best. Therefore, some people feel
that Bravo formatting is just too much trouble and instead do it "by hand".
They are a small minority.
When Bravo crashes
Like all text editors, Bravo breaks once in a while. There is nothing quite like the sinking feeling
you get when a large number of your precious keystrokes gurgle away down the drain. When they
do, you probably have an instinctive response (conditioned by previous editors you have used) to
run the editor again to find out what state your file is in. Resist this impulse at all costs-it is the
worst thing you can do.
Bravo has a "replay" mechanism, meaning that it records all of its actions in a file and is capable of
replaying an editing session (yes, even one involving multiple files) from the beginning. However,
all replay information is thrown away when Bravo initializes unless you tell it that you wish to
replay the immediately preceding session. If Bravo crashes on you, by diving into Swat or
displaying "bootlights", your best bet is to re-boot your Alto, use FTP to obtain BravoBug (unless,
of course, you already have it), refresh your memory about how replays work [13], then run
BravoBug. Bravo/r is not an acceptable substitute. despite a popular rumor to that effect! More
details are available in [13]. The essential notion is that you must not run Bravo in the usual way,
or you will forfeit your opportunity to do a replay.
Square Pegs in Rhombic Holes-Alto Mesa
For years BCPL was the only implementation language for the Alto. Naturally, a nice cozy
environment for BCPL programs (and programmers) gradually developed, and the cognoscenti could
guess how subsystems would behave in unusual cases because they knew that the programs operated
in this environment. Then, along came Mesa and the end of innocence. Mesa programs either
have to mimic the behavior of the BCPL environment in situations where they supply overlapping
function, or risk being branded "incompatible".
Okay, so that's a bit melodramatic. Nevertheless, Mesa is faced with the problem of adapting to an
15
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
environment that it finds less than ideal. As subsystems coded in Mesa begin to emerge, subtle
incompatibilities appear (e.g., Mesa's inability, at present, to support version-numbered files).
Mesa's more modern approach to memory management (implicit segment swapping instead of
explicit overlays) has the disadvantage of consuming considerably more disk space, largely because it
has become much easier to ignore the constraints imposed by the Alto's small primary memory.
Mesa is nevertheless the progratnming language for successors to the Alto. These machines have an
architecture designed to support Mesa comfortably, and BCPL will fade away now that these
machines have arrived on the scene. Alto Mesa may be likened to a size 12 foot in a size 11 shoe;
Pilot Mesa is
(you fill in the blank).
Smalltalk
[This section was contributed by John Shoch.]
Smalltalk is both a programming language and a progratnming environment, developed by the
Learning Research Group with lots of help from other folks in CSL and SSL. The system has
always been intended to serve as both a powerful language for use by experienced programmers and
an easy language to be learned by children; some of the work of LRG has been aimed at testing
out these systems with kids.
As a programming language, Smalltalk is an "object-oriented" system which provides a uniform
epistemology:
*
*
*
Every "object" is an "instance" of some "class".
The class definition describes the behavior of all its instances.
Objects communicate by sending messages.
(Geneologists will recognize major parts of Simula and Lisp in our bloodline, combined with traces
of many other languages.)
But Smalltalk is more than just a language design-it is a highly interactive, integrated system
which tries to merge together many functions that are often viewed as separate subsystems: writing
programs, editing text, drawing, real time animation, generation of music, and more. This view
meshes well with the notion of a small, single-user personal computer (the "Dynabook"). Currently,
a large project is under way to publish the details of Smalltalk 80, and to make it available at a very
low level to outside manufacturers of small computers, in the hope of getting it out into the world
by that route.
There have been many different releases of Smalltalk, but there have been three principal designs
so far:
1)
Smalltalk 72, a fully interpreted version developed for the Alto, and used in some of
the original work with kids.
2)
Smalltalk 76, a newer version incorporating the design of a virtual Smalltalk machine, a
microcoded version of this on the Alto, a compiler to produce byte codes executed by
the virtual machine, and an object-oriented virtual memory (called OOZE) upon which
the whole thing sits.
3)
Smalltalk 80, a still newer version, currently being implemented, with a Large Object
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
16
Oriented virtual Memory (called LOOM).
For more information, take a look at [22] and [23]. The "Smalltalk 72 Manual" is now both out of print and
out of date, but did provide lots of interesting examples and discussion; try to borrow a copy from someone.
No Computer Scientist is an Island: the Laurel message system
We rely very heavily on an electronic mail system. Since people spend much of the day at their
Altos, notices posted on a central bulletin board are not likely to be seen rapidly. Accordingly,
most announcements are broadcast (to expansive distribution lists) using our electronic mail system.
If you don't check your messages once a day or so, you will soon find yourself out-of-touch (and
saddled with a mailbox full of obsolete junk mail). And conversely, if you don't make moves to get
on the right distribution lists early, you may miss lots of interesting mail. This business of using the
message system for rapid distribution of announcements can get out of .hand. One occasionally receives notices of the
form:
"meeting X will start in 2 minutes-all interested parties should attend".
We also use the electronic mail system as a way of recording the progress of working groups and
projects. Minutes of meetings, design documents, and related materials often pass as messages
among group members. A file in which a copy of each such message is retained becomes a
valuable archive of the project history and is quite painless to maintain. Many individuals keep
archival files of their messages as well.
In the bad old days, the only generally available facility for sending messages was a Maxc subsystem
called SNDMSG. A separate program, MSG, was commonly used to inspect and classify incoming
messages. Consequently, people who had no other reason to use Maxc were compelled to process
their mail there.
Our replacement for MSG is an Alto-based message system named Laurel;
Laurel is the message
composing and examining program, while Grapevine is the distributed transport mechanism, a collection of server
machines that conspire to deliver mail. Because Laurel stores mail locally on the Alto disk and requires a
moderate amount of disk space (about 500 pages), most users find it necessary to dedicate a disk on
which they process all their mail. If you like to read your mail frequently and you don't have a
double-disk system, you find yourself switching disks a lot. The latest version of Laurel (Laurel 6) has lots
of fun new bells and whistles that are worth getting to know: check out the modeless editor, thought by many to be the
greatest thing since sliced bread, and try "Run"ning some ".laurel" programs in the bottom window. Now that Laurel 6
is around, you can get the facilities of Chat, Ftp, and the Alto Executive all without leaving the Laurel cocoon.
17
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
A Printing Discussion
You might expect that Xerox Corporation might be more than a little interested in printing.
Indeed, we are so interested that we have created an array of printing facilities sufficient to confuse
any newcomer. Let's try to understand the basics.
First of all, there is an important difference between copiers and printers. A copier obtains its input
by scanning a physical image in some way. A printer obtains its input image in digital form from
some external source, e.g., an interface to an Alto.
There are a lot of printing programs about: Press, Spruce, Empress. There are a lot of printers
too: Dover, Sequoia, Versatec. To make matters worse. each of the instances of each of these
printers has a name as well: Clover, Menlo. Lilac, Daisy. As you might expect, not all programs
can talk to all printers, but we're working on that (see axiom 2 below). Here are a few axioms that
may help you reason logically about all this:
1) There are no line printers around here. All of our printers are built on top of Xerox
copier printing engines that have been lobotomized and brainwashed to understand the
babbling of an Alto instead of an optical input scanner.
2) Press files are the Esperanto of
the documents you send them be in
whatever you have in hand (usually
print it. There are several ways
documentation. Most printer servers demand that
Press file format. This means you have to convert
text) to Press format before a server will deign to
to do this.
3) Press files are hairy. Some printer servers don't support the full generality available
in a Press file. Generally, however, such servers will simply ignore what they can't figure
out, so you can safely send them any Press file you happen to have.
4) There is an extensive collection of standard fonts. and they are mostly
straightforward to use. Be prepared for a few surprises if you insist on building your
own. The most unpleasant surprise is that you have to be a wizard in order to print with your new font!
You can't use a new font unless it is added to the font dictionary on your printer, and adding fonts to
dictionaries is a delicate operation: a sad state of affairs in anyone's estimation.
In general, if you simply want to make a memo, or a listing of a program, or a copy of a
documentation file that someone has sent you, things are quite straightforward. Bravo's hardcopy
command [13] will take the file you are editing, convert it to Press format (induding all the
formatting information you have supplied), and ship it directly to any printing server you specify.
The important server program to know about is Spruce, which understands everything Bravo can
produce. Spruce is the current driving program of choice for Dovers and Penguins, and is the
server you will use for almost everything unless you are a graphics hacker.
Spruce will accept Press files from any source (though it does not implement all Press features).
Standard documents and memos are typically stored in Press format, so you can ship them directly
to your favorite Spruce server. From an Alto, use the Empress program; from Maxc or an IFS, use
the PRESS command.
Empress can tell the difference between a Press file and a text file, and will convert a text file to
Press format if necessary before sending it to the printing server. If you do this a lot, you will want
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
18
to know about various options that apply to this conversion-see {10}. In such cases, Empress uses a
single font, which generally has a fixed pitch.
This is the way we simulate a line printer.
Spruce servers have a collection of fonts stored locally. Press files do not contain the representation
of the fonts they require, only their names. Naturally, if a Press file is produced using fonts that a
Spluce server doesn't have, the server will have a hard time printing it. Spruce will attempt a
reasonable substitution for unavailable fonts, and tell you about it on the break page of your listing.
If you have chronic font difficulties of this sort, contact your local Spruce maintainer.
Most frequently traveled paths through the printing maze
Running on
Inpu t file
format
Maxc
. Text
Press
Press
Text
Bravo
Press
Draw
SIL
IFS
Alto
Output
desired
Press
Press
Press
Press
Press
Press
Press
Press
file/printer
printer
printer
file/printer
file/printer
printer
file
file
Program
to use
PRESS command
PRESS command
Press command
Empress, Bravo
Bravo
Empress
Draw or ReDraw
SIL
A few caveats go along with this table. First, it is typically easier to format and print large files
frOln Maxc (because of disk space considerations) than from an Alto, but it often takes longer.
Second, you should know that these various programs have a large number of options and defaults,
and they. are not always consistent. Beware of printing groups of files with *-expansion on Maxc
(particularly *.*) unless you are certain you are doing it properly. (LIST *.* is a disaster, for more
reasons than you might think.) For more details about printing, and before you try to do anything
clever, read {21}.
Beyond the Black and White Horizon· MAXC and the Arpanet
Sitting at your Alto, you can easily forget about the other computing facilities that are within your
grasp. One important server on the network is MAXC, which is a home-grown microprogrammed
processor masquerading as a PDP-IO, and running Tenex. Maxc is connected to the Arpanet, so it
is possible for you to reach out to any machine connected to the Arpanet, at least in principle. In
practice, not many people do (and there are restrictions imposed by our ARPA contract as well), except to
send messages to people at other Arpanet sites. Laurel understands Arpanet names in messages, so
you don't need to use Maxc directly to send or receive Arpanet mail.
Looking under Rocks
All Alto users should know about various interesting files and directories. There is no coherent
logic to the placement of "general interesf' files and directories, nor even to the division between
Maxc and Ivy. Browse through the glossary at the end of this document to get a rough idea of
what's around. If something is available to the universities in the University Grant program, then it is probably on
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
19
Maxc (or archived off of Max c), since Maxc is the machine that the university folk can access.
Browsing on Maxc
The primary directories for documentation on Maxc are , (Doc>, (PrintingDocs>,
. As you can see, the naming conventions aren't very consistent, so you may have to
fumble around a bit before you find the right one. The Tenex file name completer (ESC) can take
some of the difficulty out of remembering, as can a quick glance in the glossary at the end of this
document
Just because you don't find a particular file, don '( give up! Tenex has an automatic facility called
"archiving", which moves infrequently accessed files to tape. It sometimes happens that the
documentation you are looking for has been archived. There is a Tenex command, "Interrogate",
that will help you locate an archived file-see [9].
Maxc is still the file repository "of record" for some families of files, though that burden is
gradually being shifted to various IFS servers. These servers frequently have duplicate copies of
documentation, packages, subsystems, and the like. This is done partly for redundancy and partly to decrease
the load on Maxc when a new version of a popular Alto facility is released. Duplicated directories always have
the same name on IFS servers, but are not always scrupulously maintained, and therefore may be
inconsistent, incomplete, or obsolete. Proceed with caution.
Browsing on IFS servers
IFS servers don't have an archiving facility (yet, although they may soon), which means that you are
less likely to overlook something interesting. IFS supplies a general sub-directory stnlcture which
the Maxc file system lacks, and as a result there are many more pigeonholes in which to look. For
example, on Maxc you might look for
My FavoritePackage.press
while on IFS you would probably look for
(Packages>Doc>MyFavoritePackage.press
(Packages> My FavoritePackage>Documentation.press
or perhaps some other permutation. This requires a bit of creativity and a little practice. However,
if you use the "Chat Executive" and get in the habit of using "*"s in file name specifications, you
will find all sorts of things you might not otherwise locate. Note that a "*,, in a request to an IFS
will expand into all possible sequences of characters, including right angle brackets and periods.
Thus, for example, a request for
(Packages>*press
refers to all files on all subdirectories of the Packages directory that end with the characters "press".
A "*,, won't match a left angle bracket, by the way. Thus, if you ask for "*.press", you are referring to all Press files
on the current directory. If you ask for "<*.press", you are referring to all of the Press files on the entire IFS (and
expect such searches to take a LONG TIME!).
Warning: Once you have gotten used to the IFS conventions about "*"s in file names, you will
find the TENEX rules quite restrictive and unnatural. On TENEX, an asterisk can only be used to
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
20
wildcard either the entire filename or the entire extension. If you want to refer to all of the files on
a TENEX directory, you must say "*. *", not just "*"; this lack of "forward compatibility" (the
opposite of backward compatibility?) has tripped up many a searcher.
Code Phrases
You may occasionally hear the following incomprehensible phrases used in discussions, sometimes
accompanied by laughter. To keep you from feeling left out, we offer the following translations:
"Committing error 33"
(1) Predicating one research effort on. the success of another. (2) Allowing your own
research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research
effort or not). Known elsewhere as Forgie's principle.
"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs."
Mostly self-explanatory. Usually applied to the bold souls who attempt to use brand-new
software systems, or to use older software systems in clever, novel, and therefore
unanticipated ways ... with predictable consequences. Also heard with "asses" replacing "backs".
UWe're having a printing discussion. "
Refers to a protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of
something peripherally interesting to all. Historically, printing discussions were of far greater
importance than they are now. You can see why when you consider that printing used to be done by
carrying magnetic tapes from Maxc to a Nova that ran an XGP.
Fontology
The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts. It has been said
that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.
UWhat you see is what you get."
Used specifically in reference to the treatment of visual images by various systems, e.g., a
Bravo screen display should be as close as possible to the hardcopy version of the same
text.
UHey guys, up-level!"
The conversation has degenerated to a discussion of nitty-gritty details. This phrase is
often preceded or followed by: "We're having a printing discussion."
smashed to zero
A quaint way of saying that some memory location has acquired the value zero when it
should have something else. "Smashed" is much preferred to "clobbered" in local argot, though in this
context it seems about as appropriate as using a wrecking ball to stack bricks.
ULife is hard"
Two possible interpretations: (1) ~While your. suggestion may have some merit, I will
behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) ~Whi1e your suggestion has obvious merit,
equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of this
phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.
21
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
"What's a spline?"
"You have just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should
know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt." Moral: don't hesitate to
ask questions, even if they SeelTI obvious.
Some CSL Lore
Here are a few bits of information specific to CSL that you should know:
CSL has a weekly meeting on Wednesday afternoons called Dealer, starting at 1:15. The name
comes from the concept of "dealer's choice"-the dealer sets the ground rules and topic(s) for
discussion. When someone says she will "give a Dealer on X", she means that she will discuss X at
some future weekly meeting, taking about 15 minutes to do so (plus whatever discussion is
generated). Generally, such discussions are informal, and presentations of half-baked ideas are
encouraged. The topic under discussion may be long-range, ill-formed, controversial, or all of the
above. Comments from the audience are encouraged, indeed, provoked. More formal presentations occur
at the Computing Forum on Thursday afternoons, which is not specifically a CSL function and is open to all Xerox
employees. Dealers are also used for announcements which are not appropriate for distribution by
electronic mail.
Members of CSL are expected to make a serious effort to attend Dealer.
On occasions of great festivity, Dealer is replaced by a picnic on the hill (that is, Coyote Hill), with
Mother Xerox picking up the tab.
The CSL Archives (not to be confused with TENEX archives) are a collection of file cabinets and
3-ring binders that provide a continuing record of CSL technical activities. The archives are our
primary line of defense in legal matters pertaining to our projects, but they make interesting reading
for anyone curious about the history of any particular project. You will find it most informative to
browse the archives from time to time, just to see what's been going on in those projects you just
haven't quite had the time to monitor. Ask someone to point you at the cubicle where the archives
are stored.
If you are a CSL member and need a new disk pack, see Mike Overton in the CSL lab (across from
the Commons).
Some ISL Lore
Here is one item of information specific to
ISL:
ISL also has a weekly meeting, on Tuesday's starting at 11:00 am. This meeting is still nameless.
In fact, Chuck Geschke has a standing offer of a bottle of fine Cabernet to anyone that can come
up with a name for this meeting that Chuck likes enough to adopt: the Cabernet is aging
unclaimed as of this writing.
22
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
Gracious Living Hints
There are a couple of areas where life at PARe can be made more pleasant if everyone is polite
and thoughtful enough to go to some effort to help out. Here are a few words to the wise:
Coffee
Both ISL and CSL have coffee alcoves where tea, cocoa, and several kinds of coffee are available.
All coffee drinkers (not just the secretaries or some other such barbarism) help out by making
coffee. If you are about to consume enough coffee that -you would leave less than a full cup in the
pot, it is your responsibility to make a fresh pot, following the posted instructions. There are lots of
coffee fanatics around, and they get irritated beyond all reason if the coffee situation isn't working
out smoothly. For those coffees for which beans are freshly ground, the local custom is to pipeline grinding and
brewing; you are expected to grind a cup of beans while brewing a pot of coffee from the previous load of ground
beans. This speeds up the brewing process for everyone, since a load of ground beans is always ready when the coffee
pot runs out
Sharing Office Space
Be warned as well that some lab members are unbelievably picky about the state of their offices.
The convention is that any Alto in an empty office is fair game to be borrowed; Dolphins and Dorados
are another matter, because of the problems of sharing disk space. But, if you borrow someone's Alto, or use
their office for some other reason, take care to put everything back exactly the way it was. Don't
spill crumbs around, or leave your half-empty cocoa cup on the desk, or forget to put the owner's
disks back in her machine, or whatever. Of course, lots of people wouldn't mind even if you were
less than fanatically careful. But some people do mind, and there is no point in irritating people
unnecessarily.
Sharing Dorados, and Sharing Local Disk Space
The sharing of disk space has its own ethics and morality. First of all, don't attempt to "share" a
private partition, except with the explicit prior consent of the owner; only public partitions are
intended to be generally used in shared mode. The law regarding public partitions is that everyone
is supposed to be living cleanly: that is, completely backed up on remote file servers. Hence,
according to the "letter of the law", you are completely within your rights if you delete anything
from a public partition, whether you really need more space or not. And in fact, even if the
"thing" that you are deleting is a standard system facility, such as the Mesa compiler. But going
along with the "letter of the law" is the ~'spirit of the law". We can all use public partitions more
effectively and spend less time in CopyDisk and FTP if we treat the public partitions with some
care. Try not to delete standard systems, unless you really need the space. And be even more
careful not to leave non-standard versions of standard files on a public partition, where they might
confuse the user who follows you. Clean up after yourself if that is convenient, to give the next
user a pleasant start at her Dorado time.
In general, be aware that it is only good citizenship to try to get a sense of the common Dorado
usage patterns in your environment, and not to upset those patterns when there are clear
alternatives. Oh boy, do I feel old! When I first started hanging around CSL, the term "citizenship" referred to a
score computed from the timing and extent of one's usage of cycles on Maxc. And a big. list giving everyone's
citizenship rating as well of lots of other Maxc statistics was posted each month near the coffee alcove. Nowadays, right
across the hall, you will find the sign-up lists for the pool Dorados of CSL and ISL. Right next to the lists, you will
find posted a full list of the current rules governing signing up, and a map showing the locations of the Dorado
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb.
23
terminals.
Sharing printers
When you pick up your output from a printer, it is considered antisocial merely to lift your pages
off the top of the output hopper, and leave the rest there. Take a moment to sort the output into
the labelled bins. Sorting output is the responsibility of everyone who prints, just as making coffee
is the responsibility of everyone who drinks (coffee). Check carefully to make sure that you catch
every break page: short outputs have a way of going unnoticed, and hence being missorted,
especially when they are right underneath a long output in the stack. The rule for determining
which bin is to use the first letter that appears in the name on the break page. Thus, "Ramshaw,
Lyle" should be sorted under "R", while "Lyle Ramshaw" should be sorted under "L". A trickier
question is what to do with output for "Nonanle", which is the name of someone who hasn't logged in to their Dorado
partition. Following the rule would suggest filing such output under "N", but that doesn't seem very helpful, since the
originator probably won't find it. Check the contents and file it in the right box if you happen to recognize whose
output it is;
otherwise, (?) leave it on top of Clover, or (7) stick it back in the output hopper.
The phone system
If you make a significant number of personal long-distance phone calls off of Xerox phones, it is
your responsibility to arrange to reimburse Xerox for them. This may not be that easy, either, since
phone bills take quite a while (six weeks or so) to percolate through the bureaucracy upstairs, and the
said bureaucracy also has a lot of trouble figuring out where to send the phone bills of new people,
and people who move around a lot. Just because it is easy to steal phone service from Xerox
doesn't make it moral: if you think you aren't being paid enough, you should start agitating for a
raise. Furthermore, if enough suspicious calls are made without restitution, PARe (being a bureaucracy) will impose
some bureaucratic "solution" on us all.
But enough of preaching: so as not to end on a sour note, let's finish up by discussing how the
phone system works, anyway. The offices within PARe have four-digit extensions within the 494
exchange (what Ma Bell calls Centrex); to dial another office, those four digits suffice. Dialing a
single 9 as the first digit gives you an outside line, and you are now a normal customer of Ma Bell:
see a phone book [Oh, come now, surely you know about phone books!] for more details. Dialing a single 8
gives you different sounding dial tone, and puts you onto the IntelNet (not to be confused with the
InterNet, of course). The IntelNet is a Xerox-wide company phone system, complete with its own
phone book, and its own phone numbers. If you are calling someone in some remote part of
Xerox, you can save Mother Xerox some bread by using the IntelNet instead of going straight out
over Ma Bell's lines. On the other hand, you may not get as good a circuit to talk over; although this situation is
said to be improving. Furthermore, through the wonders of modern electronics, you can dial any longdistance number over the IntelNet. Just use the normal area code and Ma Bell number: the
circuitry is smart enough to take you as far as possible towards your destination along IntelNet
wires, and then switch you over to Ma Bell lines for the rest of the trip. Using the IntelNet doesn't start
to save money until the call is going a fair distance; therefore, the IntelNet doesn't let you call outside numbers in area
codes 408, 415, and 916-better to just dial 9 and go via Ma Bell from the beginning.
One more thing: after you have dialed a number on the IntelNet, you will hear a funny little
beeping. At that point, you are being asked to key in a four-digit number to which the call should
be billed. You should use the four-digit extension number for your normal office phone under
most circumstances. Calls made by dialing 9 instead of 8 are always charged to the phone from which they are
placed.
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
24
If you are expecting a call but won't be near your normal phone, a call forwarding facility exists:
dial 106 and then the number to which you want your calls to be forwarded. Later on (try not to
forget), you dial 107 on your nonnal phone to cancel the forwarding. There is also a way to
transfer incoming calls to a different Xerox number: Depress the switch hook once, and dial the
destination number; when the destination answers, you will talking to the destination but the
original caller won't be able to hear your conversation; depressing the switch hook again puts all
three of you on the line; then you can hang up when you please. If the destination doesn't answer,
depressing the switch hook a third time will flush the annoying ringing or busy signal.
25
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
A Glossary of Terms, Subsystems, Directories, and Files
(and acronyms, protocols, and other trivia)
ADL keyboard
ADL is a acronym for the Advanced Development Laboratory, a part of
PARC located in Southern California. This organization came up with the
ADL keyboard as an inexpensive alternative to Microswitch keyboards, and
they were used on the first few builds of Alto II's. They have extra columns
of function keys separated from the primary keys on both sides; the feel of an
ADL keyboard is unique.
Adobe
A program for submitting, collecting, and managing AR's.
functionality of the former ARSubmit.
Subsumes the
Alpine
A project within CSL to build a transactional file server for use by data base
systems to be built within Cedar and the hypothetical Cedar universal file
system. A follow-on to Juniper.
Alto
If you don't know by now...
AltoFontGuide.Press A file that tells all about the existing families of display screen raster fonts,
and describes how they are organized as different subdirectories on
[Ivy].
APC
In the armed forces, an acronym for Armored Personnel Carrier; used to
refer to the massive cabinet designed tohousebreak a Dorado. No one seems
to know what the acronym really stands for in the Dorado case: Armored
~ersonal ,Qomputer, or Armored rrocessor ,Qarrier are two possIbilities.
AR
Acronym for Action Request: a report of a bug or a request for a new
feature. AR's are part of mechanism developed within SDD for handling
feedback from users of programs to their implementors. AR's are only
relevant for software produced by SDD.
ARSubmit
Network-bootable program for submitting AR's
ASD
Acronym for Advanced §ystems Department, which was once a part of XBS,
but was disbanded some time ago.
bank
A unit of measurement of primary storage, equal to 64K 16-bits words, or
equivalently, 128K bytes. An Alto II has four banks, while Dorados have at
least eight.
bar
A generally thin, generally rectangular, generally invisible region of the screen
in which certain generally display-related actions occur, e.g., the scroll bar,
the line-select bar.
Baybill
Another name for Building 96, occupied by part of SDD. The Bayhill
building is located on Hillview just before it runs into Arastradero.
BCPL
A system programming language used as the basis for many Alto facilities.
Also,. the compiler for that language.
(widely reviled).
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
26
BFS
An acronym for Basic File System; the contents of a disk or partition used
by the Alto world. - Also a standard software package for low-level
management of an Alto file system.
BITBLT
(pronounced "bit-blit"). A complex Alto instruction used for moving and
possibly modifying a rectangular bitmap. The "BLT" part is an acronym for
BLock Transfer.
bitmap
Generally refers to a representation of a graphical entity as a sequence of bits
directly representing image intensity at the points of a raster. The Alto
display hardware and microcode process what is essentially a bitmap of the
image to be displayed. At PARC, bitmaps are normally stored in word-aligned, pure
row-major order.
Boardwalk
Another name for Building 35, the main building of PARC
(mostly heard in the
conversation of residents of PARe-place).
boot
Short for "bootstrap", which is in tum short for "bootstrap load". Refers to
the process of loading and starting a program on a machine whose main
memory has undefined contents.
boot button
The small button behind an Alto keyboard used (sometimes in conjunction
with the keyboard) to boot some program into execution. One of several
such small buttons on a Dolphin or Dorado.
boot server
A computer on the network that provides a retrieval service for certain standalone programs. See NetExec.
bootlights
A screen pattern resembling a city skyline. Occurs occasionally when some
erroneous unanticipated condition arises, e.g., getting a parity en-or in a
BCPL program on a disk that doesn't have Swat.
Bravo.run
An integrated text editor and document formatting program that runs on the
Alto; a vital program that nevertheless is no longer maintained or supported.
BravoBug.run
A program used when Bravo crashes to replay the editing actions up to the
point of the crash, and/or to report the problem. (For some time, Bravo has been
receiving only such maintenance as is truly unavoidable, so ignore the reporting function.)
BravoX.run
A successor to Bravo written in Butte with somewhat greater functionality
and a somewhat richer interface. Warning!: BravoX source files are stored in a weird
and wonderful format that almost NO programs other than BravoX can handle. Also, BravoX
runs, at the moment, only on Alto II's and (perhaps?) Dolphins.
bug award
Refers to a relatively recent custom within CSL and ISL, wherein those brave
souls responsible for ferreting out the cruelest and most intricate bugs in
critically important systems are rewarded for their efforts by being presented
with a cute little bug-shaped sticker that they can then display on their office
nameplate or elsewhere (the rough equivalent of a gold star).
Building 32
A part of PARC, located on llanover Street, north of Page Mill. Also called
PARC-place.
Building 34
A part of PARC, located on Hillview, just across Coyote Hill from the
Building 35, the home of the ICL.
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
27
Building 35
The main building of PARe, located at the intersection of Coyote Hill and
Hillview. The site of the cafeteria. Occasionally called Boardwalk (to
contrast it with PARe-place).
Building 37
A part of PARe, located on Hanover Street, north of Page. Mill, and just
south of PARC-place. The site of the CSL Electronic Model Shop.
Building 96
A part of OPD, located where Hillview runs into Arastradero; also called the
Bayhill building. Current home of some parts of SDD.
Butte
A new compiler for BCPL that outputs Mesa-style byte codes instead of
Nova assembly code; also, the byte codes themselves, and the microcode that
implements them.
byte code
Lisp, Mesa, Smalltalk, and Butte at PARC compile into directly executable
languages that are stack oriented, and whose op codes are usually one byte
long. Such an instruction is called a byte code. These byte codes are in turn
interpreted by special microcode.
Cabernet
A particular Alto mail server that is part of the Grapevine distributed
transport mechanism, located in CSL.
Cascade
See PreCascade.
Cedar
A large project in CSL to build a programming environn1ent for essentially
all of CSL's future applications. Cedar is also the name of the programming
language upon which this Cedar system is built, a variant of Mesa augmented
by garbage collection and run-time types.
The design of the Cedar
environment was strongly influenced by the programming environment and
services in Interlisp.
CedarGraphics
A subroutine package of graphic primitives that forms an important part of
Cedar. Its design was heavily influenced by the results of experimental
systems written in JaM.
CenterPunch
An old name for Hornet.
Chardonnay
An Alto mail server that is part of the Grapevine distributed transport
mechanism.
Chat
A subsystem that permits teletype-like, interactive access to a remote
computer on the network. Used also to refer to a facility resembling that
provided by this subsystem, e.g., FTP is said to have a Chat window. Chat is
mainly used to communicate with Maxc and IFS servers.
Chipmunk
A D-machine program for interactively creating and editing integrated circuit
designs. Chipmunk makes use of a color display in addition to the normal
black-and-white one. It is a successor to Icarus.
Cholla
A Laurel-based process control program being written for ICL with help
from CS;L.
click
A manipulation of a mouse button. Pushing and releasing a mouse button
several times in quick succession is sometimes called a "double-click", "tripleclick", etc. as appropriate.
28
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
client
A program (rather than a person) that avails itself of the services of another
pr?gram or system. Laurel is a client of Grapevine. See user.
Clover
A Dover located in CSL.
Clover Fonts.Press
A file that lists by family name, face, size, and rotation all of the fonts in
Clover's font dictionary; available on [Ivy]
A directory on which screen fonts for the Alto are stored (extension .AL).
Subdirectories are used on this directory to distinguish various families of
display screen fonts that have accumulated over the years.
[Ivy]
A directory on which the standard starting configurations for Alto disks are
stored, as files with extension ".bfs". The normal way to initialize a new Alto
pack is to use CopyDisk to retrieve one of these disk images.
[Ivy]< Cedar>
The source of actual Cedar. code and documentation.
[Ivy)
A library of packages for use within Cedar.
[Ivy]
A directory containing various documents of printing interest, including
Fonts.widths.
You might be interested in CloverFonts.Press, and/or
AltoFontGuide.Press.
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
33
[Ivy]
A directory on which Mesa programs (source and object) and documentation
are stored. Additional facilities of interest to Mesa programmers may also be
found on .
[I vy]
A directory on which Mesa utilities and packages (source, object and
documentation) are stored. Standard Mesa programming facilities may be
found on .
[Ivy] Doc>
The home of the memo SettingUpPilot.
[Ivy]
A directory that is periodically reinitialized as a complete copy of
[Idun]MakeConfig>MakeConfig.Press and ditto. bravo.
Marion
A Librarian server in SDD/Palo Alto.
Markup.run
A (dead) Alto subsystem for editing Press files.
MAXC
Acronym for Multi-Access ~erox ~omputer (pronounced "Max"). A locally
produced computer that is functionally similar to the DEC PDP-IO. At one
time, there were two MAXC's, named Maxcl and Maxc2, but Maxcl has
gone away forever. From now on, "Maxcl", "Maxc2", and "Maxc" are all
natnes for the same machine, which used to be called Maxc2.
[Maxc]
A directory on which standard Alto (BCPL) programs and subsystems are
stored. Only object code files (extension .BR) and runnable files (extension
.R UN) are stored here; source files and documentation are stored on
[Maxc] and [Maxcl, respectively.
[Maxc]
A directory on which documentation for Alto programs is stored. Common
extensions are .PRESS (for files directly printable by Press or Spruce), and
See [Maxcl and [Maxcl for
.TTY (plain text).
corresponding source and object files.
[Maxc] A directory on which source versions of standard Alto programs are stored.
Corresponding object versions and documentation are stored on and
, respectively.
[Maxcl
A directory containing files that are usable as templates (in Bravo) for various
kinds of documents (e.g., memos, letters, reports).
[Maxc]
A directory containing printing and graphics programs.
[Maxc] A directory containing documentation related to printing and graphics
facilities such as Press files and font file formats.
[Maxc]
A directory containing standard distribution lists for use with SNDMSG.
[Maxc]
A directory containing standard TENEX subsystems.
Mokelumne
A former release of Pilot.
Menlo
A Dover located in ISL.
35
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
menu
A collection of text strings or icons on a display screen generally used to
represent a set of possible actions.
Mesa
A PASCAL-like, strongly typed, system programming language developed by
CSL and SDD.
MesaNetExec
A Mesa implementation of the NetExec; valuable because it knows how to
load Othello.
MetaFont
A font-designing language built by Don Knuth at Stanford, and used to
generate fonts for use with TEX. Metafont is available as MF.Sav on Maxc.
Microswitch keyboard
Microswitch is a company that make keyboards. The standard Alto
keyboard, also in use at P ARC on Dolphins and Dorados, is made by
Microswitch. In contrast, see ADL keyboard.
MIG
An acronym for Master Image Generator: a high-resolution laser-scanning
printer, based on a photographic process. The MIG-l can run up to 2000
bpi, while the slightly different MIG-3 runs at about 800 bpi.
Mockingbird
A music system that runs on a Dorado with an attached audio synthesizer
and its keyboard. The goal of Mockingbird is to relieve the serious composer
of some of the clerical burden of writing out scores for music as it being
composed.
MType
Another early product of the system modelling effort:
[Ivy] that uniquely identifies
any computer in an Internet.
Nursery
A large room in CSL, across from the Commons; so named because it was
to be where new printers would be nursed to life, and also where fresh blood
(summer interns and the like) would be housed. Does this mean that Bob Taylor
thinks of graduate students as infants? I don't think so; course, I could be wrong... The
funny windows were intended· to make it convenient to hold demonstrations
in the Nursery with some of the audience on the outside, looking in.
OIS
An acronym for Office Information ~ystems: a name for a concept, a type of
product, and (perhaps) a market, not a particular organization.
for infonnation, see
36
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
OPD
An acronym for Office froducts Division, of which SnD is a part.
Orbit
A high perfonnance image generator designed to merge source rasters into a
raster output stream for a SLOT printer (e.g., Dover). So named because it
ORs bits into buffers.
OS
Acronym for Qperating ~ystem.
Generally used to refer to the Alto
Operating System, which is stored in the file Sys.boot. Rarely used locally to
refer to the operating system of the same name that runs on IBM 360/370
computers.
Othello
A network-bootable Pilot utility, good for initializing logical volumes and the
like.
page (on a disk)
A unit of length: an Alto page is 512 bytes, while an IFS page is 2048 bytes.
PARC
Acronym for
PARC-place
Another name for Building 32, located on Hanover.
partition
A chunk of a large local disk that is being used to emulate the largest system
disk that the Alto OS allows. A Dorado has five partitions, while a Dolphin
has two. Partitions are numbered starting at 1; the phrase "partition 0"
refers to the current default partition. The current partition is use is
determined by the contents of some registers that belong to the disk
microcode. You can change these registers with the "partition.""" command
available in the Executive and in the NetExec. A (14-sector) partition has
22,736 Alto pages (11.6 MBtyes). It took a little adroit shoehorning to fit two full
~alo
Alto Research
~enter.
partitions onto a Dolphin's disk: it turns out that a Shugart 4000 has just one too few
cylinders to squeeze in two full partitions. So we have to ask the heads to seek off the end
of the advertised disk (on the inside, it happens), and put one more cylinder in there! Ah,
the joys of hardware hacking...
PasMesa
A program that more or less compiles Pascal source into Mesa source, and
hence assists in importing Pascal programs into our environment; developed
in CSL.
path name
A complete description of a directory or subdirectory on which files may be
stored-everything you need to know to get the file except the file name. A
path name consists of a machine name in square brackets followed by a
directory name in angle brackets, optionally followed by one or more
subdirectory names, each followed by a right angle bracket.
Penguin
Generic name for a type of 384 bpi laser-scan printer built on the Xerox
5400 xerographic engine, and connected to an Alto by means of an Orbit
interface. Penguins have better solid-area development than Dovers, and can
also print two-sided. They are normally driven with Spruce.
Phylum
An IFS in P ARC-place.
physical volume
The name for a disk pack in Pilot.
PIE
Acronym for ~ersonal Information gnvironment. Implemented in Smalltalk,
PIE uses a description language to support the interactive development of
programs, and to support the office-related tasks of document preparation,
electronic mail, and database management.
For more information, browse
[Ivy].
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
Pilot
37
An operating system that runs on D-machines, and was produced in SnD for
by Star and future products. Pilot is also the current base for Cedar.
us~
Pine
The page-level file access protocol used by Juniper.
plaid screen
Occurs when certain kinds of memory smashes overwrite the display bitmap
area or control blocks. The term "salt & pepper" refers to a different pattern
of similar origin.
Plate Maker
An old name for the MIG.
Poplar
An interactive programming language system running on the Alto, an
experimental system in the direction of programming by relatively
inexperienced users. Useful for text manipulation applications.
Poseidon
A Tool that provides the functionality of Neptune in the PreCascade
environment.
PreCascade
The current version of an interim integrated Mesa development facility based
on Pilot. A future version (and a prior version, confusingly enough) will be (was)
called simply Cascade. When operating in PreCascade, editing, compiling,
binding, and creature comforts all happen inside of the CoPilot world. A
world-swap occurs to the Pilot world only when actually trying out the
program currently undergoing development
Press
A file format used to encode documents to be transmitted to a printer. Also,
a printing server program, written in BCPL, that can print curves and raster
images as well as characters and rules.
PressEdit.run
A subsystem that recombines Press files on a page-by-page basis; it can also
merge illustrations into documents, although requesting this is a somewhat
arcane and delicate operation.
PrincOps
The Xerox Mesa Processor Principles of QQeration, essentially a description
of a particular abstract machine. D-machines implement the PrincOps
architecture, and Pilot was constructed to run on PrincOps machines.
printer server
A computer that provides printing services, usually for files formatted in a
particular way. The term also refers to the specific software that converts
such files into a representation that can be processed by a specific printer
hardware interface. Spruce is an example of a printer server program.
products
The following is a list of the most commonly encountered Xerox product
numbers and their distinguishing characteristics:
800
860
2600
3100
4500
5400
5700
6500
7000
8000's
typewriter-based, word-processing terminal
display-based, word-processing terminal
desktop copier
3 sec/page copier, good solid black-area development
1 sec/page copier, 2-sided copying
1 sec/page copier, good resolution
1 sec/page laser-scan printer
20 sec/page copier, color copying
1 sec/page copier
the parts of Star have numbers in this range
The Alto-Dolphin-Dorado Briefing Blurb
9200
9700
38
offset-qu ali tYt .5 sec/page copier
offset-qualitYt .5 sec/page, laser-scan printer
~rinting ~ystems
PSD
Acronym for
Division.
Puffin
Generic name for a type of 384 bpi laser-scan color printer built on the
Xerox 6500 xerographic engine t and normally driven by Press.
PUP
Acronym for PARC Universal Packet. The structure used to transmit blocks
of information (packets) on the -Ethernet. Also, one such unit of information:
a datagram. Bob Metcalfe once remarked that this name was chosen since all prior PARC
communication protocols were "real dogs" .
Quake
A Dover on the first floor of Building 35.
R-Name
A complete name from Grapevinets point of view: R-names have two parts, a
prefix and a registry separated by a dot, as in "Anderson.PAH. R-names that
designate distribution lists end in an "t", as in "CSLt.PA".
registry
A concept used by Grapevine to partition the space of names.
"WBST"t and "EOS" are examples of registries.
Rem.cm
A file used by the Alto Executive to store commands to be interpreted after
the current one has completed. See Com.cm.
replay
Refers to a Bravo facility that permits recovery after a crash. See BravoBug.
Reticle Generator
A version of the MIG that will print directly on masks for integrated circuits.
Rockhopper
A Penguin in the Bayhill building.
Rubicon
The current release of Pilot.
rule
A printing term describing a rectangle whose sides are parallel to the
coordinate axes; usually thin enough in one dimension or the other to be
thought of as a (horizontal or vertical) line.
Scavenger.boot
A program available through the NetExec that checks for damaged file
structures in a BFS and tries to repair them.
Science Center
Half of PARC; the other half is the Systems Center. The rationale behind
the specifics of the division are unclear.
scroll
Refers to a method of repositioning text on a display as though it were part
of a long, continuous sheet of paper.
SDD
Acronym for
SettingUpPilot
A memo on how to set up a Pilot world on a Dolphin and Dorado, with lots
of good dope on what is really going on; available on [Ivy]Shapshot.press or ditto.bravo.
!:aser Output Transducer.
solid-area development The ability of a printer to produce large areas of black. Requests for large
black areas on printers like Dovers, which don't have this ability, will result
in a fringe of dark gray around a sea of light gray.
Spruce
A program that takes certain simple Press files (primarily text and rules),
converts them to a form acceptable by an Orbit interface, and prints them.
SSL
Acronym for §ystem ~cience 1aboratory, a former part of the Science Center
of PARC.What used to be SSL now exists as a collection of "groups" or
" areas" (of which the author does not have a very good model).
Star
An OIS product of Xerox, developed within SDD. Also referred to by
various product numbers in the 8000's. The primary professional workstation
of Star is the 8010. The 8000 architecture was created in CSL.
Stinger
A Hornet located in ISL, running Press.
subdirectory
File directories on an IFS can be divided into a hierarchical collection of
subdirectories. The subdirectory names are listed from the top of the tree
down to the bottom, and are separated by the single character ")". For
example, the directory [lvy].
{20}
[Maxc]
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