Comment by pjmlp
10 years ago
How has Mesa as systems programming language? Did you also used Cedar?
From my own experience with Oberon derived systems, and all the Xerox PARC documentation that I have from Mesa/Cedar, I became convinced that we really lost with UNIX model becoming widespread into the industry instead of what Xerox was researching.
I only wrote one graphics application in Mesa, as a student at Stanford. I never used Cedar or SafeMesa or any of the Alto successors, although I visited PARC a few times and saw them used.
Xerox had to invent Mesa because they were previously stuck writing BCPL, a predecessor to C sometimes known as the British Cruddy Programming Language.
Xerox's world model was closed systems with a few beautiful applications written by experts. End users were not to be allowed access to the guts of the software. The realization of this was the Xerox Star, which was a nice, and very expensive, world processor with a few additional applications. (Visualize a system that runs Microsoft Office and nothing else.) The idea that ordinary people would write application programs was completely alien to Xerox. Their market was secretaries.
Visualize a system that runs Microsoft Office and nothing else
So 95% of corportate desktops? (I guess if you include Outlook and IE in a wider definition of "Office")
Pagemaker would be a better analogy, but point taken, the star was far richer in features than office.