Kind of a tangent, but something that has bugged me about the Alto and pretty much every modern machine since is the ad-hoc design of the bootstrap mechanism for fetching the machine image from somewhere on the network.
In moderm machines, the bootstrap is pretty primitive and something like pxeboot. Redhat has hired hoardes of programmers to build tools to support this process, which is really just a testimony to how ad-hoc the tool chain is; how do we know when Redhat has perfected the process? What design wisdom is there to suggest that the Alto was in any way better? On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The Alto did not have a lot of transistors in it, but was a very fine > meta-machine, so one might think about how to posit an even simpler Alto, > but that would still have its meta-capabilities. The Mead-Conway "regular > architectures" (also developed at PARC) hint strongly about how easy it is > to make HW and how best to abstract it. The first RISC chip is also quite > nice in this regard (and real, but not nearly as well thought out as the > Alto was). > >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
