Comment by primis
10 years ago
I love the fact the Computer History Museum is keeping this source alive. But without an Alto Emulator, it's almost worthless. Kinda sad how much technology is dead simply because the hardware is gone to run it.
10 years ago
I love the fact the Computer History Museum is keeping this source alive. But without an Alto Emulator, it's almost worthless. Kinda sad how much technology is dead simply because the hardware is gone to run it.
There appears to be at least a couple of emulators:
http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/altogether/
Not an emulator but: http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html
Honestly, the release of this might stir somebody to get one going. It would be a weird beast to emulate though.
Probably not as much as a Setun? This is the only ternary computer emulator I could find: http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/
Here is an emulator of Alto Smalltalk-72 by Dan Ingalls, the original implementor.
http://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html
It says that it is emulating the Nova instruction set - the Alto hardware manual at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/... says that the standard microcode on the Alto emulated the Nova.
Evolution?
One might be able to recover some old species' DNA - it is not enough to clone it back to life.
It's a shame the license they're offering it under is restrictive; non-commercial use only means it's not DFSG-friendly or anything.