🚀 go-pugleaf

so, enough about the 820.  it's out of our class.

Re ability to program star necessary:
not necessarily -- all you really need is an interface specification
for the graphics, as many applications run on the corporate (remember
who this is targeted for) mainframe, and probably will continue to
run much better there than on the star.  Sure, it would be nice to use
mesa, but it's not absolutely for their market.  The neat thing
about the graphics on it is that it appears to work on a "representational"
basis internally, and so to get things down the line to it, you don't
have to hack the bit map to produce a chart, just send down a rep-list
and let it do the rest.  I have no technical people from Xerox who
say that it is representational, just my own guess from seeing it
and knowing that the output on the print server was much better than
the graphics "screen photo" which we can get from the alto to
the dover.

Re bigger is better:
it is.  Managers look at large spread sheets, as the weakest example
of this.  And remember, Xerox is trying very hard to simulate an entire
desk with this thing.  This give rise to wanting to see a whole
page of text (860-style) on the screen at the same time as your bunch
of most-used icons.

Re what is neat about Mesa:
I haven't touched the manual since it was given to me in 1979, but 
as I recall, Mesa implements Public and Private parts of modules,
has ports and Joins for them to implement multitasking, allows Catching
data when a Signal is generated instead of just getting a condition,
has all the usual pascal records and data types and ranges, a little
better syntactically and more flexible,... at the time, it looked
like an easier-to-understand Green (since Ada).  But more importantly,
it is implemented in a powerful programmer's system.  As the manual says,
"Mesa is really a programming system of which the language is but one part."
(Caveat: I have never programmed in the language, so this is superficial
at best.)
				Brian
				(BNH@MIT-ML)
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