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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: Dover speed
Message-ID: <929@uw-beaver>
Date: Mon, 18-Mar-85 19:43:25 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.929
Posted: Mon Mar 18 19:43:25 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 20-Mar-85 06:29:54 EST
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: jbn@ford-wdl1.arpa

     The Dover at Stanford is still front-ended by a Xerox Alto, the world's
first workstation.  The Alto was developed around 1974, at Xerox PARC; it
has a CPU with loadable microcode, a small hard disk, a large screen,
about 128KB of RAM, and a 3MB Ethernet interface.  Original cost was about
$20-30K each, but they were never sold, just used internally at Xerox and
some cooperating research institutions.  The Ethernet interface stole 
cycles from the main CPU; you could compute, do net I/O, or do disk I/O,
but not more than one at a time (sounds like a Mac, doesn't it).  So
as a front-end processor for a printer it was not a big winner.
     The Dovers at PARC may have more modern front ends; I'm not up on
present happenings at PARC, but by now they probably have replaced their
Alto engines.  This may explain the speed differential.

				John Nagle