Programming for the Alto's Mesa

Josh Dersch derschjo at gmail.com
Tue Jun 21 10:25:07 CDT 2016


On 6/21/16 8:14 AM, Ian S. King wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> Mesa became the basis for much of the software on Xerox's later
>> D-machines (the Star and its successors).  It was compiled into a
>> byte-coded stack-based machine code (the bytecode interpreter was
>> implemented in microcode on the Alto and later machines) and apparently the
>> code density was pretty remarkable (from what I've read).  The Viewpoint
>> GUI and applications were written in it.  It was a strongly-typed
>> high-level language with exceptions.  I don't (yet) have any direct
>> experience in using the language, but it's something I want to get around
>> to one of these days.
>>
>> - Josh
>>
> ISTR that BravoX was written in Mesa.  -- Ian
>
Yes it was, as was MazeWar and the Laurel mail client (and many other 
things).

- Josh



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