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From: chris@xerox.com (Chris Heiny)
Subject: Re: Xerox 53D
Message-ID: <1997Jan27.135032.3889@news.wrc.xerox.com>
Sender: news@news.wrc.xerox.com
Reply-To: chris@xerox.com
Organization: Xerox Corporation, Webster NY
References: <5ca0f3$jod@orac.mon.rnb.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 13:50:32 GMT
Lines: 32

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.

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.


Maybe we ought to start an XDE website?

						Chris

