Please say more ... The Alto didn't have any hardware for this ... nor did it have any regular code ... it was microcoded and almost a Turing Machine in many ways. The main feature of the hardware architecture was the 16-way zero-overhead multitasking of the microcode pre-triggered by simple events.
Are you actually commenting on the way the first Ethernet interface was done? Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: John Zabroski <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, January 3, 2011 10:19:06 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] The Elements of Computing Systems 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). > > >
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