Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time I was wandering through PARC and I wandered into a closet where a giant Ceder machine (Dorado) was running. It has an un flipping believable 512x512 COLOR display! It was an entire eight foot tall rack and its fans for the ECL logic roared like a hurricane. This deluxe personal computer from Xerox ran as fast as a Decsystem 20 massive time sharing machine that normally hosted 20-40 users.

Unfortunately everybody at PARC believed Butler lampson when he said you could write a personal computer program and if it crashed once per day that's okay you just pressed a button and rebooted it! Everybody took that to heart and wrote buggy unstable software and all the D-machines (wildflower architecture) including Dorado Dolphin Dandelion and Dandetiger crashed once per hour! it seems Butler lampson didn't consider joint probability distributions...

Xerox made okay programming environments but Pilot and Smalltalk and Interlisp were horrible operating systems compared to UNIX v7.

I used to do a lot of development on a Dorado (usually at night -- I was low enough on the totem pole that I wouldn't grab one during the day, and used a Dolphin instead). They didn't crash all the time, at least in the InterLisp world I was using.

Cedar was a programming language and a development environment (not an operating system) and also run on Solaris as demonstrated in the demo, and I didn't see it crash during the two hour demo.

Not exactly. The three main environments (Smalltalk, Interlisp-D and Cedar) took over the machine completely. Each had its own network stack, window system, et al. Those environments didn't have memory protection so from an OS perspective they were more like classic MacOS rather than current MacOS.

They weren't general purpose OSes: there was a single "environment" running bare on the machine. That's why porting Cedar, Symbolics images etc is possible: you stick the whole thing in a single address space in user space.

Pilot would crash with probability 0.9^p, where p is the number of things you did at once, p=4 was a limit I never surpassed. With UNIX p=30 was commonplace.

It is easy not to crash, when everything that one is able to do are text based applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com