Portrait Screens
To the modern eye, the Alto looks odd – mostly because of the portrait orientation of its screen
At my place of work, a lot of people have portrait screens.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has released another foundational piece of software to the world at large: some of the code that gave the world the Xerox Alto computer, which among other things helped inspire a couple of young garage developers, Steves Jobs and Wozniak. To the modern eye, the Alto looks odd – …
Hi John,
You don't need the microcode to run the executables because the Alto microcode implements specialised instruction sets for running user programs. It's emulators for the instruction sets you need.
The standard instruction set was almost identical to the Data General Nova minicomputer instruction set and the BCPL compiler targeted that.
There was a byte-code instruction set for the Mesa compiler; another for Smalltalk; and yet another for Lisp.
Nevertheless, Alto software will be so Alto hardware specific you'd need an Alto emulator too (and there is one that kinda runs OK).
http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html