This memo discusses the reasons for making a substantial number (10-30) of copies of the personal computer called Alto which has been designed by Chuck Thacker and others. The original motivation for this machine was provided by Alan Kay, who needs about 15-20 'interim Dynabooks' Systems for his education research. Alto has a much broader range of applications than this origin might suggest, however. I will begin by outlining its characteristics, and then go on to consider some of the many exciting uses to which Alto can be put. It turns out that there is some interaction with almost every CSL research program.

An Alto system consists of

The system is capable of doing almost any computation which a PDP-10 can do. For most problems it can deliver better performance to the user than a time-shared 10, even if the latter is lightly loaded (obvious exception: lots of floating-point computation). Furthermore, we have under development Lisp, Bcpl, and MPS systems which can run on a Nova and therefore, with slight modification, on Alto. Since most of our own future software work is expected to be done in one of these languages, most of it should be able to run on Alto.

The next paragraph shows that there should be plenty of computing power. Both Lisp and MPS will have some kind of hardware-assisted mapping, as that virtual memory size will not be a problem; a similar arrangement for Bcpl seems feasible, but has not been investigated.

A 64K Alto has as many Lisp cells as 32K of PDP-l0 memory. BBN claims to run Lisp users with an average 25K working set and a 30 ms page fault interval. Forty-two disk tracks hold 256K Lisp cells, and the average access time to a record on one of those tracks is about 32 ms, compared for 17 ms for the 10's drum. Hence, if execution speed on Alto is half the 10 speed or less, paging will cost no more than on the 10 for Lisp programs. It is highly plausible that we can get a Lisp system on an Alto with a few specialized instructions which can deliver half the performance of a Tenex Lisp running in a 32K swap space. Comparable results can be expected for other languages.

All the applications considered here depend on two facts which summarize the contents of the last section:

a) Distributed computing. We can very easily put in an Aloha-like point-to-point packet network between Alto's, using a coax as the ether (or microwave with a repeater on a hill for home terminals). We can then do a large variety of experiments with dozens of machines. It is easy to try experiments which depend on the independence of the participants as well as those which use specialized components which must cooperate to accomplish anything. In particular, we can set up systems in which each user has his own files and communications is done solely for the interchange of sharable information, and thus shed some light on the long-standing controversy about the merits of this scheme as against centralized files.

b) Office systems. We can run Peter's Lisp-based NLS-competitor or the xNLS system. The computational overkill of Alto will allow us to concentrate on the capabilities of the system rather than on optimizing its performance. Information gained from this approach should complement that obtained from the multi-user xNLS experiments. It may also be possible to run these on Alto and thus escape from Nova dependency; this possibility requires further investigation.

c) Personal computing. If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal computers are correct, we should be able to demonstrate them convincingly on Alto. If they are wrong, we can find out why. We should, for example, be able to satisfy heavy Lisp users such as Warren and Peter with an Alto. This would also take a big computing load away from Maxc. It should also be quite easy to simulate the hardware configuration of other proposed personal computers (e.g., different memory hierarchies) and thus to validate those designs. This is important because more compact machines will require a much larger investment in engineering development and more precise optimization of the memory system.

d) Graphics. Alto is an excellent vehicle for Bob Flegal's graphics work, and will make the fruits of that work available to a wide community. It can't do Dick Shoup's stuff.

Alto competes with some other things we or SSL are doing. I think this is a good thing, since it encourages the proponents of both approaches to excel. Specifically;

a) VTS can do higher quality characters, has intensity control and blinking, costs half to two-thirds as much if you only want a terminal, and can take advantage of the video switch. It can't do graphics and may suffer from the queueing problems of shared-resource systems (the controlling Nova and communications are shared). And, of course, it is only as good as the computer which uses it.

b) Maxc can compute, and for applications which use existing software, need large working sets, or do lots of multiplications, it will be better. Also, it is known to be good for Lisp, etc., while the suitability of Alto for such large systems remains unproven.

c) Novas which don't have complex interfaces to other hardware (e.g., Toy, XGP) can be replaced by Altos. Those which do, like the Maxc Nova or, probably, the VTS Nova, are secure.

d) The implications of Alto for the local network are unclear.

e) Imlacs are wiped out.