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From: steele@eng.mc.xerox.com (Richard A Steele)
Subject: Re: Xerox 53D
Message-ID: <1997Jan27.153335.6635@news.wrc.xerox.com>
Sender: news@news.wrc.xerox.com
Reply-To: steele@eng.mc.xerox.com
Organization: The Document Company, Xerox
References: <1997Jan27.135032.3889@news.wrc.xerox.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 15:33:35 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <1997Jan27.135032.3889@news.wrc.xerox.com>, chris@xerox.com (Chris Heiny) writes:
>In article <5ca0f3$jod@orac.mon.rnb.com>, hdavies@kzin.mon.rnb.com (Hugh Davies) writes:
>[kasnip]
>>[Anyone know if the Alto
>>talked PUP?]
>
>Yes, Altos did speak PUP.
>
>>- Pilot. Subsequently marketed as XDE, the Xerox Development Environment,
>>Pilot was a general purpose operating system for the D machines. It came with a
>>compiler for a language called 'Mesa', a debugger called CoPilot and the
>>usual bits and bobs of a general putpose operating system. Pilot was used
>>to develop;
>>
>>- Viewpoint. This was Xerox's office automation product. It started out
>>being called "O/S", then was renamed to Viewpoint, then to GlobalView,
>>then it was scrapped. It was a closed, proprietary, WIMP GUI environment
>>which would be entirely familiar to anyone who has used a Mac or Windows
>>95, except it came out in the late 70s/early 80s.
>
>Actually, Pilot was the OS upon which both XDE and Star/ViewPoint/GlobalView
>were built.  It provided pretty slick multithreading, memory mapped files,
>true virtual memory, and a spiffy, reliable filesystem.

And, don't forget DocuTech.  Take Pilot, add some extensions for multiple processors,
extend the memory range, beef up the file system and you have RTOS, the OS that
runs the DocuTech.

>XDE was quite a slick windowing system/OS with a lot of nice tools, including
>a working debugger and a dependency checker.  Its the immediate conceptual
>ancestor of SunTools, and the grandpa of OpenWindows.

We still use XDE for our code development, debug, maintainence, etc.  I'm always a
little awed when I weed through the code and realize that I'm looking at history:
the XNS, TCP/IP and ethernet code is mind boggling, and the comments reflect the
evolving nature of the standards.  Wonderful code archeology!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Steele           | My words are my own, not my employer's...         
Xerox Corporation        |
steele@eng.mc.xerox.com  |


