Casey Ransberger wrote on Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:44:01 -0700 > Apologies for the off-topic question, but does anyone know if the actual bits > for Sketchpad are still extant somewhere? Is there any documentation that > anyone has for the Lincoln TX-2? It'd sure be neat to emulate it.
This first place to look for information about old computers is BitSavers, such as http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/tx-2/ > Someone was asking me about object oriented programming with a head full > of Java yesterday and I wanted to point at some things. Recently I had a > really > great experience using an Apple IIgs emulator to explain HyperCard (kind of > an odd version, but it worked,) I had no idea that HyperCard ever ran on machines other than the classic Mac. > and it dawned on me that if we wanted to learn history by doing, we really > ought to grab at whatever bits are out there and curate the damned things. > And: selfish childish desire to play with Sketchpad! Now that there is (or seems to be - I was unable to test) a reasonable emulator for the Alto, it would be nice if some disk images for it were publicly available. Specially any Smalltalk related ones. http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/Xerox/Alto/simulator/salto/ Since Sketchpad only ran on a single computer in the whole world, even in its day most people exposed to it experienced it as movies instead of a live demo. These movies are available today. Certainly an emulator would be nice, but the i/o devices on PCs are different enough from the TX-2 that I don't know how realistic the experience would be. Even a Vectrex (an interesting videogame from 1982) emulator is rather different from the real thing (which I had the pleasure of seeing in action live about four years ago).. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc