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Comment by diskzero | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see a link to an interesting and historical document like this, I look up the authors to see what the ended up doing after. I didn't recognize any of the authors, but did some searching.

James Mitchell [1] is still with us and developed the first ARM instruction set, and went on to work at Acorn, Sun and Oracle doing interesting work.

Richard (Dick) Sweet was most recently at Adobe and just completed a 4000 mile Tesla trip around the America West.

I couldn't find any other info about William Maybury outside of his work at PARC. William (Bill?) are you out there in HN land?

Here is some additional info on Mesa. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Mitchell

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language)

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Dick Sweet was living in Ashland, OR last I checked. Jerry Morrison and I actually went to his fabulous house in the 00's. (Jerry is the coauthor of the "Let's DO allow hindsight" page on [1]).

As many HN'ers know, I wrote a book about this; it's a novel mainly so I could have characters and dialog; no one remembers what they said 45 years ago, if they're even still alive! If they did remember things, their memories would be colored by hindsight, and I didn't want that. The underlying facts are rigorously accurate.

I don't know where Bill is, either, or if he's alive. He was down in El Segundo, not up in Palo Alto, and joined Star from the old XDS (Xerox Data Systems).

Funny about the Mesa language: I just got an audiobook made of this, and I had to tell the narrator how to pronounce the language! Also that it's re-flect-OM-eter, not re-FLECT-o-meter, and Terry Winograd's name is WIN-oh-grad, not WHY-no-grad.

AMA.

[1] https://www.albertcory.io

Albert,

Thanks for the additional info. I'll be sure to check out your book.

Whenever I think of Xerox, I only think of PARC. I rode past it for years and years and years as I went up and down Foothill from Apple. I didn't know about the El Segundo location.

Whenever I think of Star, or Alto, I focus on the GUI, the Smalltalk, etc. but of course the actual system had to be in place to host these applications.

Just for fun, I tried to see if the various sculptures were visible on current satellite at the (former?) Xerox A&E location on Aviation Blvd. but I couldn't find them. Bummer!

P.S. I just bought your book. I hope I meet you someday and can get you to sign it!

I'd be delighted.

The A&E sculptures were there for a long, long time, but now that it's been renovated and re-rented (look up 777 S. Aviation), I guess they got rid of them.

I'm actually Bob Purvy. I didn't change my name; just using a pen name, for no very good reason.

Bob, I am pleased to report the sculptures are visible in this Street View scene. [1]

I hope they won't vanish like the giant icons in the Apple Infinite Loop campus.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.906084,-118.3786489,3a,75y,2...

I'm one of those unfortunate souls who did not know about your book until now. Needless to say, I just ordered a copy, and am champing at the bit for it to arrive now. I love this kind of historical stuff. Probably the same reason I've watched all of Halt and Catch Fire twice now, and will probably watch the whole series again at some point. There's just something amazing about that era (by "that era" I'm intending to say sometime approximately in the mid-to-late 70's, through the "PC revolution" in the 80's, and some part of the "Internet revolution" of the 1990's).

Yeah, I kinda liked Halt and Catch Fire until it got into video games in Season Two. Not really my thing.

The cover picture on my book actually features Dave Smith's son Jeffrey playing MazeWar on a real working Alto.

Some other pointers:

"Fire in the Valley", "Soul of a New Machine", everything Maher has published on http://www.filfre.net/ , "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", the stories at https://www.folklore.org/ about the Macintosh.

But bear in mind that the Mac became big, which is why it's easy to find Mac stories. There are similar stories about other communities too, though harder to find. For example, here's a 2-part story about the Amiga - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3DJF7MbMU .

As a reminder, don't only read books about success, but also failure. "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure", about an early pen-based platform in the 1990s.

And there's fiction, like "Microserfs".

Right.

On "Soul of a New Machine" check out my podcast interview of Dick Sonderegger [1]. Besides being an incredibly fun story of learning computers in the Marines during the Vietnam era (spoiler: he never left the US), he talks about knowing the real Data General guys in that book (another spoiler: they didn't have much regard for Tracy Kidder)

[1] https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link

Most of the Xerox papers (including mine) are behind paywalls, individually, but fortunately you can get them all for free on bitsavers [1].

Fun fact: LeRoy Nelson has a paper in there. In the book, I had to pick some job for "Janet Saunders" that didn't do too much violence to the real story, so I picked LeRoy's (build czar). Janet is not in any way modeled on LeRoy!

"D.C. Smith" (or Dave Smith, the inventor of icons) has a bunch of papers in that PDF, and he wrote the Foreword for my book. It's his son Jeffrey on the cover, playing MazeWar.

[1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/OSDR8203_Xerox_Office_Sys...

That link doesn’t work!

Seems to have lost a hyphen: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/OSD-R8203_Xerox_Office_Sy... (note Bitsavers has directory listings).

> I just got an audiobook made of this

You probably want to update your [1] accordingly, now that Christmas and New Year is over and we’re all somewhat conscious again :)

(Not an audiobook person, but just got the ebook version and looking forward to gobbling it up, given I reread folklore.org every year or so.)

Sigh. Yeah, thanks for the reminder.

Done. Thanks. Check it out.

Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber should be surprised... kidding aside, ARM was significant and I think it behooves us all to be more accurate with our attributions!

Quite! According to Wikipedia he "managed the development of the first ARM architecture", which is not the same thing as GP claims, at all!

Sorry about that. Thanks for the correction!

Lol, I didn't expect a reaction after this amount of time! Thanks for taking this seriously!

Great info! Thanks for the links.

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