I brought the updated logic to Marc's lab, set up the disk tool and successfully wrote cartridges and read cartridges from the Diablo disk drive. We are using the tool to build images for our upcoming demos at the Vintage Computer Festival West on August 5 and 6.
The rest of the day was spent working out the exact software images we needed after developing our high level script for the demonstration. We will show:
- Bravo, the word processor that was written by Charles Simonyi before he left PARC to go write its descendant, Word, at Microsoft.
- Draw is what it sounds like, a generalized drawing program.
- SIL is a tool to draw schematics
- Neptune is the ancestor of File Explorer or similar file management software
- Ethernet which was created for the Alto and its use for FTP, network booting, file serving, etc
- Smalltalk, the language and environment developed by Alan Kay to explore object oriented sw
- Games such as Astroroids, Pinball, and others developed by students doing grad work on Altos
Your statement, "and successfully wrote cartridges and read cartridges from the Diablo disk drive," deserves more fanfare! I know what a long difficult journey it was to refine your tool from something that wrote cartridges it could read back itself into one that would produce working bootable disks. Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteDuring the first week of July, my partner and I traveled from our home in Massachusetts to the Bay Area. The last day of our trip was spent at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I specifically visited the IBM 1401 thinking of you and the whole crew of amazing restorers. Thank you all for all that you do!