[Uri’el-2012]

This is what you could do with an Alto in 1973.

What chip set and programming language did it use ?

Did it have an op/sys ?

[Mycroft Holmes]

It was a 12-bit microcode Nova emulation built out of TTL in it's hardware. The thing it had was hardware bit block transfer, which meant you could copy graphics across byte boundaries without paying the penalty of unwrapping the bits.

We owned the microcode and it was adapted for whatever higher level language we were running. The best of these were Mesa/Cedar and Pilot/Copilot. Mesa is what Java (language, not script) has finally become. Pilot/Copilot was a world-swap debugger that as far as I know, the likes of which doesn't exist anywhere. Also ran Lisp and Smalltalk as well as B & C.

Good times.