Conceptually we long debated unifying everything and in an ideal perfect world we would have done it. The reason was one primary goal for a new standard was to make it easily parseable and having unique rather than repeated codes was key to that. Sadly in the end we did not unify everything only to get buy-in from all major countries to support. That’s even why you see the roman/asciii characters repeated within Unicode itself—like as romaji. This was all well in good until we came to CJK and the number characters with semantical overlap was huge that this was more seriously considered—infact we started investigating this at Xerox before even thinking about Unicode and that work predated and influenced and leveraged the work done later.

I’m not sure if Google has ever done similar but people use google as a verb to mean web search and I’m not sure if they worried about losing brand protection or though of it as an advantage in acquiring users.

I remember that I ignored most of the stuff when I did my compiler from the book I used and did a recursive descent parser which the book really, if I remember correctly, did not cover except maybe for a brief mention. The instructor was also pushing everyone to use lex/yacc and I thought that was not the right way to go if you wanted to actually understand things. Interesting most of the folks that used lex/yacc had trouble completing the assignment whereas I thought it was straightforward.

It was by far the best language that I used for my entire working career where I had to endure such languages as PL/1 (and PL/S), C, C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP. While Java as a lang was not too bad it still paled in features and usability compared to MESA and it too was influenced by MESA.

But as was true at Xerox was it was the complete network that was revolutionary at the time in the early 80’s. The fact that I could source debug any machine remotely on the corporate would wide network of over 5000 machine and that the source code would be automatically done loaded to my machine (mean I could easily debug from any nearby random machine) was just something I could never “easily’ do elsewhere.

MESA was missing a few things (which CEDAR solved and used generally within only Xerox PARC partially because at the time it really only ran on Dorado class machine) such as Garbage collection and in the case of Star it would have been much better if the language supported OOP. For Star we had had a system called Traits to support objects but it had some serious issues IMHO (which would be fodder for a separate post.)

When talking about Mesa you also need to talk about Tajo, its development environment built onto- of the OS Pilot (Star also used Pilot.) But systems also supported a mouse and a large bitmapped monitor and had overlapping windows (although most of Star have automatic non overlapping windows that was a UI usability decision.)

There is also more because the network was very important. Print severs, file servers, mail servers, cloudless store for all of Star’s user files/desktop. All this in the very early 80’s was unheard of elsewhere. It’s very similarly to what Steve Jobs missed when he saw Smalltalk where he only really saw a new UI and missed much more that was demoed.

It was a magic place to work at the time, I had left in the very late 80s for Apple and it was a huge step backwards at the time (but did amazing stuff with their limited tools but made working not fun.)

The Xerox Development Environment (TAJO/XDE) was more windows like where windows were processes and shrunk down to the bottom of the screen when closed. Star was developed using Tajo but are completely separate systems with very different user interfaces. For example Tajo used cut/copy/paste and any window could be set overlapping where as Star use a MOVE, COPY where use selected the object pressed the verb action button, and then selected the destination (use that was modal!). Also Star choose to have non-overlapping tiled windows (except for modal dialogues & style sheets.) The windowing was changed in later versions to allow any window to overlap.

What’s even more confusing is that Xerox had lots of systems including smalltalk, interlisp, star, Cedar & Tajo at the time Lisa was released. They also had lots or prototypes systems including Rooms and the Alto for that matter.

Apple absolutely also did their own research and design that was unique. And in cases the duplicated earlier research but came to a different conclusion (for example the number of buttons on a mouse.)

I think Apple did more with direct manipulation than others did taking it to more extremes — but you can still see that in other earlier systems.

I’m pretty sure the decisions were made before he was consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was dysfunctional.

[I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs. They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining market share in the race to the bottom.]

I too am from the before times where I guess we built essentially our own frameworks to handle own unique issues and take security into our own hands (verses have to trust external libraries and external resources….)

I sadly laugh when I hear 20+ years late people are still fighting back button navigation issues. I still see sites that can’t handle double posts correctly or recovery gracefully when post responses fail/timeout.

I’m out of the game now but for all the benefits of the web it’s been haves to death to support stuff the underlying infrastructure was nit designed for.

And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.

The compiler/run/debug & repeat cycle was light years ahead of how we developed on the mainframe. On the mainframe, using PL/1, you had a global onerror handler that would dump all variables and do a core dump of your program failed/crashed. The output was on from a line printer that you usually got a few hours after you submitted your job. On average you got 1 maybe 2 job runs a day. At least we didn’t have to use punch cards like the electrical engineers did for their Fortran programs; we used “glass TTYs” where we could save our virtual cards to a file system and later modify. Oh, and you needed to have the magic JCL cards at the beginning or your job. Those were the days.

Later that year the CS dept got their own VAX and from then on most coursework was done on that system using BSD Unix. The EE’s still had to use punch cards on the mainframe.

We did have a few other systems for some courses but the majority of stuff ended up being C or Pascal on Unix (with the occasional language like lisp or prolog for some classes.)

It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.

Only Municipal power companies like in Sacramento, LA, Palo Alto & Santa Clara to name a few have rates that are 1/3 to 1/2 of PG&E rates. They pay a small grid interconnection fee to the other utilities but beyond that their cost structure is much lower and they don’t have to return dividends to stock holders.

Gas rates have a similar cost structure between municipal and public companies although for some reason there are fewer municipal gas companies at least for smaller cities.