Ken Shirriff documented his experience building a gateway using the BeagleBone single-board computer to communicate with the Alto’s Ethernet we covered previously: I decided to build a gateway that would allow the Alto to communicate with a modern system. The gateway would communicate with the Alto using its obsolete 3Mb/s Ethernet, but could also communicate with […]
Tag Archives: Alto
Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto computer
Ken Shirriff writes: I’ve been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded up the necessary hash algorithm in BCPL (the old programming language used by the Alto) and found that although the mining algorithm ran, the Alto was so […]
“Hello world” in the BCPL language on the Xerox Alto simulator
Ken Shirriff writes: The first programming language for the Xerox Alto was BCPL, the language that led to C. This article shows how to write a BCPL “Hello World” program using Bravo, the first WYSIWYG text editor, and run it on the Alto simulator. The Xerox Alto is the legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped […]