Xerox Alto Restoration Part 15 - Ethernet mysteries solved, Alto back in one piece
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- This video is dedicated to the memory of Chuck Thacker (February 26, 1943 - June 12, 2017), primary architect of the Alto hardware.
The last Ethernet hardware mysteries are solved and we are able to do some primitive exchanges with the Alto over the network. Which means we are done with the main hardware restoration! It's time to take the Alto off life support and put it back together. After one big scare, our restored Alto is back in his cabinet, looking spiffy, and ready for demos and exhibitions.
Did you hear Charles Thacker passed away on Monday? He did the Ethernet on the Alto. Great work by you and the other members of the group by the way, has been such an interesting series watching you get this back up and running.
Chuck Thacker was the designer of the Alto.
Chuck was the Alto's main hardware architect. With Bob Taylor, two of the great minds behind the Xerox Alto just passed away. The following email was forwarded to us on 6/14/2017:
"Roy, Alan [Kay], Butler [Lampson] & Kurt [Taylor],
I'm sorry to tell you that my father Chuck Thacker passed away in the
early hours of this morning, after a short battle with cancer. He died
peacefully and without pain at home with his wife of 52 years, Karen,
and daughters Kathy and myself all with him. He was incredibly brave and
stoic, as I'm sure you can imagine, and refused all invasive medical
treatment following his diagnosis in March. As per his wishes, there
will be no memorial or service. Kurt, when we heard that Bob [Taylor]
was gone my father was so sad, and I was also so sorry to hear the news.
Working with Bob and all of you was a source of incredible joy,
excitement, and fulfillment for him -the great animating thread that
wound through his life. We are sad he is gone, but his life was such an
epic adventure that mainly we're all just glad we got to be a part of
it.
Please feel free to distribute this news widely.
Christine Thacker"
Just from the documentaries, I'll always recall the XEROX PARC team as a bunch of young volleyball playing happy hippy scientists.
TheKumaDono
TheKumaDono pop
Rest In Peace Chuck. May you forever live on in the Ether of the Net.
This is the best vintage computer channel on the internet. Make more!
Excellent work! RIP Chuck :(
Can't wait to see Smalltalk in action. That was what really electrified Steve Jobs and his Apple team when PARC showed it off. 😉
These videos on the Alto are great!! Thanks Mark for sharing your restoration and troubleshooting processes with the world, as well as your great R2 videos
I hope you can do more videos about restoring vintage computer system. Thank you so much!
PS - very cool calculator. :)
Wow! - I've been following this project from the very beginning - i'm so excited for you to get it working - keep up the good work guys!
Amazing work guys. It's been very interesting to follow the restoration of the Alto.
I really enjoy watching all of these videos. Their something soothing about watching the transition from non op to op.
Congratulations! Watching you guys debugging this beauty since Part 1 was so interesting I almost wish the bugs and glitches would have never ended ;) Thank you so much for sharing!
So enjoying following along with your restoration of this Alto. Can't wait to see Smalltalk80 running!
great troubleshooting guys.. that looked like fun
i really like what you do, it's very relaxing while being instructive. i would have like to leave in the time when you could actually fix hardware issue without throwing the thing in the bin ...
I like the idea of a bbs or communication network just for vintage hardware, mostly as a way to exchange & archive software. I tried setting up a wildcat BBS for this purpose a long time ago.
This is just amazing guys!!
Cheers Marc, really interesting.
awesome work
awesome. greets from Austria.
Doctor Ken. My hero :!
You guys are sure to be amongst the few humans deemed worthy to live by our future AI overlords.
Is it using the same kind of power supply boxes as old teradynes? Sure looks the same..
I got the HP15c on my phone and it's the best calculator.
On my mac I got the 16c of course.
This is too complicated for me. I expect the Cylons to show up at any time.
Beaglebone black ftw
What about all of the borrowed parts? (What happens when you have to return them?)
I think it's more like a "you can have it unless I need it"
Did the drive emulator eventually work?
Yes. You can see it at work in this video for example: ua-cam.com/video/yLocGtRxhp8/v-deo.html . We were able to write good disks with all the recovered software and demo them, see here: ua-cam.com/video/9H79_kKzmFs/v-deo.html
How was the beaglebone connected?
You have a typo in the title. Otherwise, great work!
Does Dr. Ken work @ Google ?
Yes, he did until recently.
now Google goes all wrong without him :)
3Mb, not MB
why are all the greats dying all of a sudden
Dying is what happens when you get *OLD*. Please tell us you knew that!
ok great... but... why????
micione1975 You should be asking "why not".
why not? Costs, effort, resources...
+micione1975, the first video here explains the historical significance of the machine, which motivated the restoration: ua-cam.com/video/YupOC_6bfMI/v-deo.html
micione1975 nothing worth doing is ever easy.
so you can learn what was, is and will be actually involved to create a computer in the real world, and not just using it because you were able to buy one.