Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC

Nonetheless…

Dorados work, and although most people at PARC now have their personal machine, it is hard to nd a spare one for a visitor (e.g. me), and the allocation method is interesting. The presence of a visitor made it necessary to go to the patch panel a couple of times a day (with muf ed annoyance) to connect the temporarily vacant of ce to the vacant machine. If this were not the case, machine allocation could be done much more simply: you sit down at the (slightly smarter) terminal you want to use, it nds a free Dorado, you log in to that and (if you care) connect, with the Ethernet, to the disk you want. Copies of the le didn’t work on my machine, though, so whenever we needed to run it we had to nd the person and so on… Given the level of interaction of the subsystems, the way PARC deals with

Files are almost outside the domain of understanding at PARC.

Source: commandcenter.blogspot.com