Ken Shirriff's blog

Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever

Showing posts with label alto. Show all posts

Showing posts with label alto. Show all posts

The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and rewriting a running GUI

Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...

Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working

In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...

Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second

I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I cod...

Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes

Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...

One-hour Mandelbrot: Creating a fractal on the vintage Xerox Alto

I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...

Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 10: New boards, running programs, mouse problems

Last week our vintage Alto was crashing; we traced the problem to an incompatibility between two of the processor boards. Today we repla...

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