Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC
I don&#x27;t really understand this memo.  I also worked at PARC when Pike was there though I didn&#x27;t interact with him or even know he was there.  If he hadn&#x27;t said PARC and Dolphin up front I would have thought he was talking about a completely different place.<p>There were, <i>barely</i> enough Dorados to go around; I worked mostly at night so I could be sure to get one, but as far as I remember everybody had a console on their desk (keyboard&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;bitmapped display).  Perhaps, as he was a visitor, he didn&#x27;t have a desk of his own?<p>Dorados were ECL machines (so obviously quite expensive), part of a family of D-machines (Dolphin was an earlier, less powerful machine, and the Dandelion workstations (which didn&#x27;t need to be in a machine room) were later marketed as the Star.  Typically you booted up an entire environment (including environment-specific microcode -- I wrote some of that): Smalltalk, Interlisp-D or Cedar&#x2F;Mesa.  Each language environment was a complete OS written in that language.<p>It&#x27;s possible that he had previously never had had access to dedicated single user machines like that; by the time I went to PARC I was used to having CADRs at MIT (again, in machine rooms with the consoles in offices) so the concept of these machines was unremarkable in itself.<p>But what he says about files and FTPing stuff around makes no sense. The environment by 1984 was heavily networked, with the email system (like a modern IMAP environment) entirely client&#x2F;server living abstractly as a network service.  Files lived on fileserver too and opening a remote file was, well, how you did things.  Since I didn&#x27;t have a dedicated machine once I connected to one I simply booted up and had my whole environment available.  I never used FTP at all.  Similarly what he said about not saving state unless he was using an Alto (or running the big D machines in Alto mode -- then they did have local disk).  The other environments all inherently saved state, like a modern iOS or Mac app.  Likewise the three environments I mentioned all handled integrated printing as would be familiar to anyone today -- and by 1984 (actually by the late 70s) there were laser printers (Dovers and even color Pengin printers) which were lickety-split; you rarely waited.<p>In fact his statement &quot;In fact, the whole world outside your machine, Ethernet notwithstanding, is a forbidding world.&quot; is cute but inexplicable: not only were various resources available on the net in what we&#x27;d call today an any cast (see what I wrote above about grapevine, the mail system) but by 1984 the ARPAnet had switched over to TCP so I routinely transparently used resources from MIT from my Interlisp environment similarly to how you might open a URL in a text editor today.<p>I agree with what he said about not using text editors in a traditional mode (Interlisp&#x27;s preferred mode was a structure editor) and indeed it would have been nice to have had &#x27;grep&#x27; in Smalltalk!<p>It reads as if he was unfamiliar with exploratory programming environments (like Smalltalk, Interlisp, and the Lispms).  He&#x27;s clearly trying to map the debug-exit-edit-compile-restart model onto a different paradigm, that of an integrated interpreted-compiled environment.  I had the same experience in reverse when I started using Unix: it was weird to me that an error caused the process to exit and dump core; I was used to an error in <i>any</i> application stopping and entering the debugger with all file, process, network etc descriptors all live and inspectable&#x2F;pokeable and being able to fix the bug in situ and continue.  That was the 1970s programming environment I&#x27;d learned on.