Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system

This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly and the processor is functioning. (The Alto uses an unusual architecture that runs multiple tasks in microcode.) Unfortunately the system still doesn't boot from disk, so the next step will be to get out the logic analyzer and see exactly what's happening. Here's Marc's video of the days's session:

The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed at Xerox PARC to investigate personal computing, introducing the GUI, Ethernet and laser printers to the world. Y Combinator received an Alto from computer visionary Alan Kay. I'm helping restore the system, along with Marc Verdiell, Luca Severini, Ron Crane, Carl Claunch and Ed Thelen (from the IBM 1401 restoration team). For background, see my previous restoration articles: day 1, day 2, day 3.

Checking the clocks

We started by checked that all the clock signals were working properly by connecting an oscilloscope to the wirewrap pins on the computer's backplane. This took a lot of careful counting to make sure we connected to the right pins! The system clock signals are generated by an oscillator on the video display card, which isn't where I'd expect to find them. Since the clock signals control the timing of the entire system, nothing will happen if the clock is bad. Thus, checking the clock was an important first step.

At first, the clock signals all looked awful, but after finding a decent ground for the oscilloscope probes, the clock signals looked much better. We verified that the multiple clock outputs were all running nicely. We also tested the reset line to make sure it was being triggered properly - the Alto is reset by pushing a button at the back of the keyboard.

Connecting oscilloscope probes to the Xerox Alto backplane.

Microcode tasks

Next we looked at the running tasks. The Alto has 16 separate tasks running in microcode, doing everything from pushing pixels to the display to refreshing memory to moving disk words. Keep in mind that these are microcode tasks, not operating-system level tasks. The Alto was designed to reduce hardware by performing as many tasks in software as possible to reduce price and increase flexibility. The downside is the CPU can spend the majority of its time doing these tasks rather than "useful" work.

Alto task scheduling is fairly complex. Each task has a priority. When a task is ready to run, its request line is activated (by the associated hardware). The current task can offer to yield by executing the TASK function at convenient points. If there is a higher-priority task ready to run, it preempts the running task. If there's nothing better to run, task 0 runs - this task is what actually runs user code, emulating the Data General Nova instruction set.

The point of this explanation is that microcode instructions need to be running properly for task switching to happen. If the TASK function doesn't get called, the current task will run forever. And if all the task scheduling hardware isn't working right, task switching also won't happen.

Below is a picture of the microcode control board from the Alto. When you're using 1973-era chips, it takes a lot of chips to do anything. This board manages which task is running and the memory address of each task. It uses two special priority encoder chips to determine which waiting task has the highest priority. The board holds the microcode, 1024 micro-instructions of 32 bits each, using eight 1K x 4 bit PROM chips. (PROM, programmable read-only memory, is sort of like non-erasable flash memory.) The board has 8 open sockets allowing an upgrade of 1K of additional microcode to be installed. Note the tiny memory capacity of the time, just 512 bytes of storage per chip.

The microcode control board from a Xerox Alto

Since tasks can be interrupted, the board needs to store the current address of each task. It uses two i3101A RAM chips for this storage. The 3101 is historically interesting: it was the first solid state memory chip, introduced by Intel in 1969. This chip holds 64 bits as 16 words of 4 bits each. Just imagine a time when a memory chip held not gigabits but just 64 total bits.

Looking at the running tasks

The control board has a 4-bit task number available on the backplane, indicating which task is running. We hooked up the oscilloscope so we could see the running tasks. The good news is we saw the appropriate tasks running at the right intervals, with preemption working properly. The following traces show the four task number bits. Most of the time the low-priority task 0 runs (all active-low signals high). Task 12 is running in the middle. Task 8 (memory refresh) runs three times, 38.08 microseconds apart as expected. From the traces, everything seems to be functioning correctly with the task execution.

Trace of the 4-bit microcode task select lines on the Xerox Alto. Top (red) is 8, then 4, 2 and bottom (yellow) is 1 bit. Signals are active-low. Each time interval is 10 microseconds, so this shows a 100 microsecond time interval.

Seeing the running tasks is a big thing, since it shows a whole lot of the system is working properly. As explained earlier, since tasks are running and switching, the microcode processor must be fetching and executing micro-instructions correctly.

Display working better now

You may remember from the previous article that the Alto display was very, very dim and we suspected the CRT was failing. The good news is the display has steadily increased in brightness from its original very dim state, so we probably won't need to replace the CRT. We also managed to see some garbage on the screen along with a cursor, showing that RAM is storing something and the display interface is working.

The display of the Xerox Alto displaying random junk.

Boot still doesn't work

Lots of things are working at this point. The minor :-) remaining problem is the system doesn't boot. Last time, we got the disk drive working: we can put a 14-inch disk cartridge (below) in the drive, the drive spins up, and the heads load. But looking at the backplane signals, we found nothing is getting read from the disk (which explains the boot failure). The oscilloscope showed that the Alto isn't sending any commands to the disk - the Alto isn't even trying to read the disk. We checked for various hardware issues and couldn't find any problems. My suspicion is the boot code in microcode isn't running properly.

Inserting a hard disk into the Diablo drive.

A bit of explanation on the boot process: On reset, microcode task 0 handles the boot. If backspace is pressed on the keyboard, the Alto does a Ethernet boot. Otherwise it does a disk boot by setting up a disk command block in RAM. The microcode disk sector task gets triggered on each sector pulse (which we saw coming from the disk). It checks if there is a command block in RAM, and if so sends the command to the disk. When the read data comes from the disk, the disk word task copies the data into memory. At the end, the block read from disk will be executed, performing the disk boot. So three microcode tasks need to cooperate to boot from disk.

Since we're seeing no command sent to the disk, something must be going wrong between task 0 setting up the command block in RAM and the sector task executing the command block. There's a lot that needs to go right here. If anything is wrong in the ALU or RAM has problems, the command block will get corrupted. And then no disk operation will happen.

Conclusion

The next step is to use a logic analyzer to see exactly what is running, instruction by instruction. By looking at the microcode address lines, we will be able to see what code is executing and where things go wrong. Then we can probe the memory bus to see if RAM is the problem, and look at the ALU to see if it is causing the problem. This is where debugging will get more complex.

I've studied the microcode and it is very bizarre. (You can see the source here.) Instructions are in random order in the PROM, what an instruction does depends on what task is running, branches happen when a device board flips address bits on the bus, and some bits in the PROM are inverted for no good reason (probably to save an inverter chip somewhere). So looking at the microcode can be mind-bending. But hopefully with the logic analyzer we can narrow the problem down. We can also use the Living Computer Museum's simulator to cross-check against what microcode should be running.

For updates on the restoration, follow kenshirriff on Twitter.

Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive

I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post describes how we cleaned and restored the disk drive and then powered up the system. Spoiler: the drive runs but the system doesn't boot yet.

While creating the Alto, Xerox PARC invented much of the modern personal computer: everything from Ethernet and the laser printer to WYSIWYG editors with high-quality fonts. Getting this revolutionary system running again is a big effort but fortunately I'm working with a strong team: Marc Verdiell, Luca Severini, Ron Crane, Carl Claunch and Ed Thelen, along with special guest Tim Curley from PARC.

If this article gives you deja vu, you probably saw Marc's restoration video (above) on Hacker News last week or read the earlier restoration updates: introduction, day 1, day 2.

Hard disk technology of the 1970s

For mass storage, the Alto uses a Diablo disk drive, which stores 2.5 megabytes on a removable 14 inch disk cartridge. With 1970s technology, you don't get much storage even on an inconveniently large disk, so Alto users were constantly short of disk space. The photo below shows the Xerox Alto, with the computer chassis (bottom) partially removed. Above the chassis and below the keyboard is the Diablo disk drive, which is the focus of this article.

The Xerox Alto II XM 'personal computer'. The card cage below the disk drive has been partially removed. Four cooling fans are visible at the front of it.

To insert the disk cartridge into the drive, the front of the drive swings down and the cartridge slides into place. The cartridge is an IBM 2315 disk pack, which was used by many manufacturers of the era such as DEC and HP, and contains a single platter inside the hard white protective case. The disk drive has been partially pulled out of the cabinet and the top removed, revealing the internals of the drive. During normal use, the disk drive is inside the cabinet, of course.

Inserting a hard disk into the Diablo drive.

Unlike modern hard disks, the Alto's disk is not sealed; the disk pack opens during use to provide access to the heads. To protect against contamination and provide cooling, filtered air is blown through the disk pack during use. Air enters the disk through a metal panel on the bottom of the disk (as seen below) and exits through the head opening, blowing any dust away from the disk surface.

Hard disk for the Xerox Alto, showing the air intake vent.

Although the heads are widely separated during disk pack insertion, they move very close to the disk surface during operation, floating on a cushion of air about one thousandth of a millimeter above the surface. The diagram below from the manual illustrates the danger of particles on the disk's surface. Any contamination can cause the head to crash into the disk surface, gouging out the oxide layer and destroying the disk and the head.

The Diablo disk and why contaminants are bad, from the Alto disk manual.

The magnified photo below shows the read/write head. The two air bleed holes ensure that the head is flying at the correct height above the disk surface. The long part of the cross contains the read/write coil, while the short part of the cross contains the erase coils (which erase a band between tracks).

Read/write head for the Diablo drive.

The following diagram shows how data is stored on the disk in 203 tracks (actually 203 cylinders, since there are tracks on the top and bottom surfaces). The drive moves the tiny read/write heads to the desired track. Each track is divided into 12 sectors, with 256 words of data in each sector.

Diagram of how the Diablo disk drive's read/write head stores data in tracks on the disk surface. From the Maintenance Manual.

In the photo below, we have removed the top of the disk pack revealing the hard disk inside. Note the vertical metal ring along the inside of the disk; it has twelve narrow slots that physically indicate the twelve sectors of the disk. A double slot is the index mark, indicating the first sector. To make sure the disk surface was clean, we wiped the disk surfaces clean with isopropyl alcohol. This seemed a bit crazy to me, but apparently it's a normal thing to do with disks of that era.

Inside the disk pack used by the Xerox Alto.

The photo below shows the motor spindle that rotates the hard disk at 1500 RPM. In front of the spindle, you can see the sensor that detects the slots that indicate sectors. To the left is the air duct that provides filtered airflow into the disk pack. (The air intake on the bottom of the disk pack was shown in an earlier photo.) Around the edge of the air duct is foam to provide a seal between the duct and the disk cartridge, ensuring airflow through the cartridge.

The motor spindle (center) rotates the hard disk. In front of the spindle is the sensor to detect sectors. To the left is the ventilation air duct for the disk.

After 40 years, the foam had deteriorated into mush and needed to be replaced. The foam no longer provided an airtight seal. Even worse, particles could break off the foam. If a piece of foam got blown onto the disk surface, it would probably trigger a catastrophic disk crash. To replace the foam, we used weatherstripping, which isn't standard but seemed to get the job done.

As well as replacing the foam, we vacuumed any dust out of the drive and carefully cleaned the heads and other drive components.

How the Diablo drive works

The drive itself has fairly limited logic, with most of the functionality inside the Alto. The drive can seek to a particular track, indicate the current sector, and read or write a stream of raw bits. Since there's no buffering in the disk drive, the Alto must supply every bit at the precise time based on the disk's rotation. In the Alto, microcode performs many interfacing tasks that are usually done in hardware. Instead of using DMA, the Alto's microcode moves data words one at a time to the disk interface card in the Alto, which does the serial/parallel conversion.

The Diablo drive opened for servicing.

Modern disk drives use a dense disk controller integrated circuit. The Diablo drive, in contrast, implements its limited functionality with transistors and individual chips (mostly gates and flip flops), so it requires boards of components. The photo above shows the 6 main circuit boards of the Alto, plugged into the "mother board": three on the left side and three on the right side. For ease of maintenance, the electronics assembly pops up as seen above, allowing access to the boards. The leftmost board is the analog circuitry, generating the write signals for the heads and amplifying the signals read back from the disk. You can see a wire running from the board to the read/write heads. The next board detects sector and index marks and controls the motor speed. The third board has a counter to keep track of the current sector number.

The three boards on the right perform seeks, moving the disk head to the desired track. The first board computes the difference between the previous track number and the requested track number. The next board counts tracks as the head moves to determine the distance remaining. The rightmost board controls the servo that moves the head to the right track. The seek servo has a four-speed drive, so the head moves rapidly at first and slows down as it approaches the right track, more sophistication than I expected. The Diablo drive manual has detailed schematics.

The photo below shows some of the colorful resistors and diodes on the analog read/write board, along with some transistors. Modern circuit boards would be much denser, with tightly packed surface mounted components.

Circuitry inside the Diablo 31 drive.

The head positioning mechanism is shown below. The turquoise circles rotate as the drive moves to a new track and the yellow pointer indicates the track number on the dial. The heads themselves are on the arm below (lower center). In front of the heads (bottom of the picture) is the metal bar that opens the disk pack when it is inserted.

Inside the Diablo disk drive. The heads are visible in the center. In front of them is the metal bar that opens the disk pack.

As the disk pack enters the drive, it opens up to provide access to the disk surface. The photo below shows the same mechanism as the previous photo, but from the side and with a disk inserted. You can see the exposed surface of the disk, brownish from the magnetizable iron oxide layer over the aluminum platter. As described earlier, the airflow exits the cartridge here, preventing dust from entering through this opening. The read/write head is visible above the disk's surface, with another head below the disk.

Closeup of the hard disk inside the Diablo drive. The read/write head (metal/yellow) is visible above the disk surface (brown).

The drive largely uses primitive DTL chips—diode transistor logic, an early form of digital logic, as well as some slightly more modern TTL chips. The photo below shows some of the chips on the sector counting board. The chips labeled MC858P provide four NAND gates, so there's not much logic per chip. (7651 is the date code, indicating the chip was manufactured in week 51 of 1976.)

Chips on a control board for the Diablo drive.

Conclusion

After putting the disk drive back together, we carefully powered up the system. The disk drive spun up to high speed, the heads dropped to the surface, and the disk slowed to 1500 RPM as expected. (One surprising complexity of the drive is it runs at a faster speed for a while so the airflow will blow contaminants out of the disk pack before loading the heads; it has counters and logic to implement this.) We verified that the disk surface remained undamaged, so the drive works properly, at least mechanically.

This was the first time we had powered up the Alto circuitry. Happily, nothing emitted smoke. But not surprisingly, the Alto failed to boot from the disk. Unless the Alto can read boot code from the disk (or Ethernet), nothing happens, not even a prompt on the screen. The photo below shows the disk with the ready light illuminated, and the empty screen.

The Xerox Alto's drive powered up, along with monitor (showing a white screen).

We have a long debugging task ahead of us, to trace through the Alto's logic circuits and find out what's going wrong. We're also building a disk emulator using a FPGA, so we will be able to run the Alto with an emulated disk, rather than depending on the Diablo drive to keep running. The restoration is likely to keep us busy for a while, so expect more updates. One item we are missing is the Alignment Cartridge (or C.E. Pack), a disk cartridge with specially-recorded tracks used to align the drive; let us know if you happen to have one lying around!

For updates on the restoration, follow kenshirriff on Twitter. Thanks to Al Kossow and Keith Hayes for assistance with restoration.

Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display

This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC to investigate personal computing. Y Combinator received an Alto from computer visionary Alan Kay, and I'm helping restore this system, along with Marc Verdiell, Luca Severini, Ron Crane, Carl Claunch and Ed Thelen. You may have seen Marc's restoration video (below) on Hacker News; my article describes the monitor repairs in more detail. (See my first article on the restoration for more background.)

The Alto display

One of the innovative features of the Alto was its 606 by 808 pixel bitmapped display, which could display high-quality proportionally spaced fonts as well as graphics. This display led to breakthroughs in computer interaction, such as the first WYSIWYG text editor, which could print formatted text on a laser printer (which Xerox had recently invented). This editor, Bravo, was written for the Alto by Charles Simonyi, who later wrote Word at Microsoft. (I discussed the Bravo editor in more detail last week.)

As you can see from the photos, the Alto's display has a somewhat unusual portrait orientation, allowing it to simulate an 8½x11 sheet of paper. Custom monitor hardware was required to support the portrait orientation, which uses 875 scan lines instead of the standard 525 lines. The Alto's monitor was based on a standard Ball Brothers computer monitor with some component values changed for the higher scan rate. This was easier than turning a standard monitor sideways and rotating everything in software.

The Xerox Alto's monitor with the case removed.

How a CRT monitor works

Since many readers may not be familiar with how CRTs work, I'll give a brief overview. The cathode ray tube (CRT) ruled television and computer displays from the 1930s until a decade or two ago, when flat panel displays finally won out. In a CRT, an electron beam is shot at a phosphor-coated screen, causing a spot on the screen to light up. The beam scans across the screen, left to right and top to bottom in a raster pattern. The beam is turned on and off, generating a pattern of dots on the screen to form the image.

The Xerox Alto's display uses a 875-line raster scan. (For simplicity, I'm ignoring interlacing of the raster scan.)

The cathode ray tube is a large vacuum tube containing multiple components, as shown below. A small electrical heater, similar to a light bulb filament, heats the cathode to about 1000°C. The cathode is an electrode that emits electrons when hot due to physics magic. The anode is positively charged with a high voltage (17,000V). Since electrons are negatively charged, they are attracted to the anode, causing a beam of electrodes to fly down the tube and slam into the screen. The screen is coated with a phosphor, causing it to glow where hit by the electron beam. A control grid surrounds the cathode; putting a negative voltage on the grid repels the electrons, reducing the beam strength and thus the brightness. Two electromagnets are arranged on the neck of the tube to deflect the beam horizontally and vertically; these are the deflection coils.

Diagram of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). Based on drawings by Interiot and Theresa Knott (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The components of the tube work together to control the image. The cathode voltage turns the beam on or off, allowing a spot to be displayed or not. The control grid controls the brightness of the display. The horizontal deflection coil scans the beam from left to right across the display, and then rapidly returns it to the left for the next line. The vertical deflection coil more slowly scans the beam from top to bottom, and then rapidly returns the beam to the top for the next image.

Monitors were built with the same CRT technology as televisions, but a television includes a tuner circuit to select the desired channel from the antenna. In addition, televisions have circuitry to extract the horizontal sync, vertical sync and video signals from the combined broadcast signal. These three signals are supplied to the Alto monitor separately, simplifying the circuitry. Color television is more complicated than the Alto's black and white display.

Getting the monitor operational

We started by removing the heavy metal case from the monitor, as seen below. The screen is at the bottom; the neck of the tube is hidden behind the components. The printed circuit board with most of the components is visible at the top. Unlike more modern displays that use integrated circuits, this display's circuitry is built from transistors. On the right is the power supply for the monitor, with a large transformer, capacitor, and fuse. On the left is the vertical drive transformer.

Inside the Alto's monitor. The screen is at the bottom. The power supply transformer is on the right and the vertical deflection transformer is on the left. The circuit board is at top.

We started by checking out the 55 volt power supply that runs the monitor. This power supply is a linear power supply driven from the input AC. The input transformer produces about 68 volts, which is then dropped to 55 volts by a power transistor, controlled by a regulator circuit. (A few years later, more efficient switching power supplies were common in monitors.) It took some time to find the right place to measure the voltage, but eventually we determined that the power supply was working properly, as shown below. At the bottom of the photo below, you can also see the round, reddish connector that provides high voltage to the CRT tube; this is a separate circuit from the 55V power supply. (Grammar note: I consider CRT tube to be clearer, although technically redundant.)

Testing the 55V power supply in the Xerox Alto's monitor.

At the top of the photo above, you can see the power transistor for the vertical deflection circuit. This circuit generates the vertical sweep signal, scanning from top to bottom 60 times a second. This signal is a sawtooth wave fed into the vertical deflection coil, so the beam is slowly deflected from top to bottom and then rapidly returns to the top. The vertical deflection signal is synchronized to the video input by a vertical sync input from the Alto.

The monitor circuit board (below) contains circuitry for vertical deflection, horizontal deflection, 55V power supply regulation, and video amplification. The board isn't designed for easy repair; to access the components, many connectors (lower left) must be disconnected.

The circuit board for the Xerox Alto's monitor.

The horizontal deflection circuit generates the horizontal sweep signal, scanning from left to right about 26,000 times a second. Driving the deflection coils requires a current of about 2 amps, so this circuit must switch a lot of current very rapidly. I've heard that the horizontal circuitry on the Alto has a tendency to overheat. We noticed some darkened spots on the board, but it still works.

The horizontal deflection circuit also supplies 17,000 volts to the CRT tube. This voltage is generated by the flyback transformer. Each horizontal scanline sends a current pulse into the flyback transformer, which is a step-up transformer that produces 17,000 volts on its output. (Interestingly, phone chargers also use flyback transformers, but one that produces 5 volts rather than 17,000 volts.)

The photo below shows the flyback transformer (upper right), the UFO-like structure with a thick high-voltage wire leading to the CRT. The large white cylinder is the bleeder resistor that drains the high voltage away when the monitor is not in use. This unusually large resistor is 500 megaohms and 6 watts, and is connected to the tube by a thick, red high voltage wire. The deflection coils are visible at the left, coils of red wire with white plastic on either side. The deflection coils are mounted on the outside of the tube. At the bottom is the power transistor for the horizontal circuit.

The CRT tube in the Alto's monitor, showing the deflection coils around the tube. The flyback transformer is in the upper right. The bleeder resistor is on the right.

Needless to say, extreme caution is needed when working around the monitor, due to the high voltage that is present. The high voltage circuitry can be tested by holding an oscilloscope probe a couple inches away from the flyback transformer; even at that distance, a strong signal shows up on the oscilloscope. The CRT tube also poses a danger due to the vacuum inside; if the tube breaks, it can violently implode, sending shards of glass flying. Finally, X-rays are generated by using high voltage to accelerate electrons from a cathode to hit a target, just like a CRT operates, so there is a risk of X-ray production. To guard against this, the glass screen of a CRT contains pounds of lead to shield against radiation (which makes CRT disposal an environmental problem). In addition, the monitor's circuitry guards against overvoltages that would produce excessive X-rays. The photo below shows some of the safety warnings from the monitor.

Safety warnings on the Alto monitor. CRTs pose danger from implosion, X-rays, and high voltage.

Since we don't have the Alto computer running yet, we can't use it to generate a video signal. Fortunately we obtained a display test board from Keith Hayes at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. This board, based on a PIC 24F microcontroller, generates video, horizontal, and vertical signals to produce a simple test bar pattern on the display. We used this board to drive the monitor during testing.

Test board from the Living Computer Museum to drive the Alto's monitor.

We got a bit confused about which signal from the test board was the horizontal sync and which signal was the video. When we switched the signals around, we got a buzzing noise out of the monitor (see the video). Since the horizontal sync signal drives the high voltage power supply, we were in effect turning the power supply on and off 60 times a second with an audible effect. We eventually determined that Keith's test board was wired correctly and undid our modifications.

Even with the test board hooked up properly, the display didn't seem to be operational. But by turning off the room lights, we could see very faint bars on the display. We discovered that the monitor's brightness adjustment was flaky; just touching caused the display to flicker. Removing the variable resistor (below) and cleaning it with alcohol improved the situation somewhat. We tested an electrolytic capacitor in the brightness circuit and found it was bad, but replacing it didn't make much difference.

The brightness control on the Alto monitor. This control was flaky and needed cleaning.

At the end of our session, we had dim bars on the display, showing that the display works but not at the desired brightness. We suspect that the CRT tube is weak due to its age, so we're searching for a replacement tube. Another alternative is rejuvenation – putting high-current pulses through the tube to get the "gunk" off the cathode, extending the tube's lifetime for a while. (If anyone has a working CRT rejuvenator in the Bay Area, let us know.)

The monitor successfully displays the test bars, but very faintly.

Our work on the monitor was greatly aided by the detailed service manual. If you want more information on how the monitor works, the manual has a detailed function description and schematics. An excerpt of the schematic is shown below.

Detail of the schematic diagram for the Alto's monitor, showing the CRT. The schematic is online in the manual.

The disk controller

Our previous episode of Alto restoration ended with the surprising discovery that the Alto had the wrong disk controller card which wouldn't work with our Alto's Diablo disk drive. Fortunately, we were rescued by Al Kossow, who happened to have an extra Alto disk interface card lying around (that's Silicon Valley for you) and gave it to us. Below is a photo of the Alto disk interface card we got from Al. At the left is the edge connector that plugs into the Alto's backplane. The disk cable attaches to the connector on the right.

The Alto II Disk Control card, the interface to the Diablo drive.

Conclusion

Our efforts to get the monitor working were moderately successful. Although the monitor is dim, it functions well enough to proceed with restoring the Alto. We'll see if we can improve the brightness or obtain a new CRT tube. We will probably work on the disk drive next, as the drive is necessary for booting up the Alto. Since the drive is a complex mechanical device with precise tolerances, I expect a challenge.

"Hello world" in the BCPL language on the Xerox Alto simulator

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 set the direction for personal computing. Since I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto (details), I wanted to learn more about BCPL programming. (The influential Mesa and and Smalltalk languages were developed on the Alto, but those are a topic for another post.)

The Xerox Alto II XM computer. Note the video screen is arranged in portrait mode. Next to the keyboard is a mouse. The Diablo disk drive is below the keyboard. The base contains the circuit boards and power supplies.

Using the simulator

Since the Alto I'm restoring isn't running yet, I ran my BCPL program on Salto, an Alto simulator for Linux written by Juergen Buchmueller. To build it, download the simulator source from github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator, install the dependencies listed in the README, and run make. Then run the simulator with the appropriate Alto disk image:

bin/salto disks/tdisk4.dsk.Z

Here's what the simulator looks like when it's running:

The Salto simulator for the Xerox Alto.

(To keep this focused, I'm not going to describe everything you can run on the simulator, but I'll point out that pressing ? at the command line will show the directory contents. Anything ending in .run is a program you can run, e.g. "pinball".)

Type bravo to start the Bravo text editor. Press i (for insert). Enter the BCPL program:

// Hello world demo
get "streams.d"
external
[
Ws
]

let Main() be
[
Ws("Hello World!*N")
]

Here's a screenshot of the Bravo editor with the program entered:

A Xerox Alto 'Hello World' program for written in BCPL, in the Bravo editor.

Press ESC to exit insert mode.
Press p (put) to save the file.
Type hello.bcpl (the file name) and press ESC (not enter!).
Press q then ENTER to quit the editor.

Run the BCPL compiler, the linker, and the executable by entering the following commands at the prompt:

bcpl hello.bcpl
bldr/d/l/v hello
hello

If all goes well, the program will print "Hello World!" Congratulations, you've run a BCPL program.

Output of the Hello World program in BCPL on the Xerox Alto simulator.

The following figure explains the Hello World program. If you know C, the program should be comprehensible.

'Hello World' program in BCPL with explanation.

The BCPL language

The BCPL language is interesting because it was the grandparent of C. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was developed in 1966. The B language was developed in 1969 as a stripped down version of BCPL by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. With the introduction of the PDP-11, system software needed multiple datatypes, resulting in the development of the C language around 1972.

Overall, BCPL is like a primitive version of C with weirdly different syntax. The only type that BCPL supports is the 16-bit word, so it doesn't use type declarations. BCPL does support supports C-like structs and unions, including structs that can access bit fields from a word. (This is very useful for the low-level systems programming tasks that BCPL was designed for.) BCPL also has blocks and scoping rules like C, pointers along with lvalues and rvalues, and C-like looping constructs.

A BCPL program looks strange to a C programmer because many of the special characters are different and BCPL often uses words instead of special characters. Here are some differences:

Blocks are defined with [...] rather than {...}.
For array indexing, BCPL uses a!b instead of a[b].
BCPL uses resultis 42 instead of return 42.
Semicolons are optional, kind of like JavaScript.
For pointers, BCPL uses lv and rv (lvalue and rvalue) instead of & and *. rvalues.
The BCPL operator => (known as "heffalump"; I'm not making this up) is used for indirect structure references instead of C's ->.
selecton X into, instead of C's switch, but cases are very similar with fall-throughs and default.
lshift and rshift instead of << and >>.
eq, ne, ls, le, gr, ge in place of ==, !=, <, <=, >, >=.
test / ifso / ifnot instead of if / else.

A BCPL reference manual is here if you want all the details of BCPL.

More about the Bravo editor

The Bravo editor was the first editor with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing. You could format text on the screen and print the text on a laser printer. Bravo was written by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi in 1974. Simonyi later moved to Microsoft, where he wrote Word, based on the ideas in Bravo.

Steve Jobs saw the Alto when he famously toured Xerox Parc in 1979, and it inspired the GUI for the Lisa and Mac. However, Steve Jobs said in a commencement address, "[The Mac] was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that [calligraphy] course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them." This is absurd since the Alto had a variety of high-quality proportionally spaced fonts in 1974, before the Apple I was created, let alone the Macintosh.

The image below shows the Hello World program with multiple fonts and centering applied. Since the compiler ignores any formatting, the program runs as before. (Obviously styling is more useful for documents than code.)

The Bravo editor provides WYSIWYG formatting of text.

The manual for Bravo is here but I'll give a quick guide to Bravo if you want to try more editing. Bravo is a mouse-based editor, so use the mouse to select the text for editing. left click and right click under text to select it with an underline. The editor displays the current command at the top of the editing window. If you mistype a command, pressing DEL (delete) will usually get you out of it. Pressing u provides an undo.

To delete selected text, press d. To insert more text, press i, enter the text, then ESC to exit insert mode. To edit an existing file, start Bravo from the command line, press g (for get), then enter the filename and press ESC. To apply formatting, select characters, press l (look), and then enter a formatting code (0-9 to change font, b for bold, i for italics).

Troubleshooting

If your program has an error, compilation will fail with an error message. The messages don't make much sense, so try to avoid typos.

The simulator has a few bugs and tends to start failing after a few minutes with errors in the simulated disk. This will drop you into the Alto debugger, called Swat. At that point, you should restart the simulator. Unfortunately any files you created in the simulator will be lost when you exit the simulator.

If something goes wrong, you'll end up in Swat, the Xerox Alto's debugging system.

Conclusion

The BCPL language (which predates the Alto) had a huge influence on programming languages since it led to C (and thus C++, Java, C#, and so forth). The Bravo editor was the first WYSIWYG text editor and strongly influenced personal computer word processing. Using the Alto simulator, you can try both BCPL and Bravo for yourself by compiling a "Hello World" program, and experience a slice of 1970s computing history.

Inside the tiny RFID chip that runs San Francisco's "Bay to Breakers" race

How does a tiny chip time the runners in the Bay to Breakers race? In this article, I take die photos of the RFID chip used to track athletes during the race.

Bay to Breakers, 2016. Photo courtesy of David Yu, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Bay to Breakers is the iconic San Francisco race, with tens of thousands of runners (many in costume and some in nothing) running 12km across the city. To determine their race time, each runner wears an identification bib. As you can see below, the back of the bib has a small foam rectangle with a metal foil antenna and a tiny chip underneath. The runners are tracked using a technology called RFID (Radio Frequency Identification).

The bib worn by runners in the Bay to Breakers race. At the top, behind the foam is an antenna and RFID chip used to detect the runner at the start and end of the race.

At the beginning and end of the race, the runners cross special mats that contain antennas and broadcast ultra high frequency radio signals. The runner's RFID chip detects this signal and sends back the athlete's ID number, which is programmed into the chip. By tracking these ID numbers, the system determines the time each runner took to run the race. The cool thing about these RFID chips is they are powered by the received radio signal; they don't need a battery.

Mylaps, whose name appears on the foam rectangle, is a company that supplies sports timing systems: the bibs with embedded RFID chips, the detection mats, and portable detection hardware. The detection system is designed to handle large numbers of runners, scanning more than 50 tags per second.

Removing the foam reveals an unusually-shaped metal antenna, the tiny RFID chip (the black dot above the word "DO", and the barely-visible word "Smartrac". Studying the Smartrac website reveals that this chip is the Impinj Monza 4 RFID chip, which operates in the 860-960 MHz frequency range and is recommended for sports timing.

The RFID circuit used to detect runners in the Bay to Breakers. The metal forms an antenna. The tiny black square in the center is the RFID chip.

Getting the chip off the bib was a bit tricky. I softened the bib material in Goof Off, dissolved the aluminum antenna metal with HCl and removed the adhesive with a mysterious BGA adhesive solvent I ordered from Shenzhen.

The chip itself is remarkably tiny, about the size of a grain of salt. The picture below shows the chip on a penny, as seen through a microscope: for scale, a grain of salt is by the R and the chip is on the U (in TRUST). This is regular salt, by the way, not coarse sea salt or kosher salt. I spent a lot of time trying to find the chip when it fell on my desk, since it is practically a speck.

The RFID chip used to identify runners is very small, about the size of one of the letters on a penny. A grain of salt (next to R) and the RFID chip (next to U).

In the picture above, you can see the four round contact points where the chip was connected to the antenna. There's still a blob of epoxy or something around the die, making it hard to see the details. The chip decapsulation gurus use use boiling nitric and sulfuric acids to remove epoxy, but I'm not that hardcore so I heated the chip over a stove flame. This burned off the epoxy much better than I expected, making the die clearly visible as you can see in the next photo.

I took 34 die photos using my metallurgical microscope and stitched them together to get a hi-res photo. (I described the stitching process in detail here). The result is the die photo below (click it for the large image). Surprisingly, there is no identifying name or number on the chip. However, comparing my die photo with the picture in the datasheet confirms that the chip is the Monza 4 RFID chip.

I can identify some of the chip's layout, but the chip is too dense and has too many layers for me to reverse engineer the exact details. Thus, the description that follows is slightly speculative.

Die photo of the Impinj Monza 4 RFID chip.

The four pins in the corners are where the antenna is connected. (The chip has four pins because two antennas can be used for improved detection.)

The left part of the chip is the analog logic, extracting power from the antenna, reading the transmitted signal, and modulating the return signal. The rectangles on the left are probably transistors and capacitors forming a charge pump to extract power from the radio signal (see patent 7,561,866).

The right third of the chip is so-called "random logic" that carries out the commands sent to the chip. According to the datasheet, the chip uses a digital logic finite state machine, so the chip probably doesn't have a full processor.

The 32 orderly stripes in the middle are the non-volatile memory (NVM). Above the stripes, the address decode circuitry is barely visible. The chip has 928 bits of storage (counting up the memory banks on the datasheet) so I suspect the memory is set up as a 32x29 array. Some NVM details are in patent 7307534.

Along the lower and right edges of the chip, red lines are visible; these connect chips together on the wafer for testing during manufacturing (patent 7307528).

The Impinj Monza 4 RFID chip on top of a 8751 microcontroller chip shows that the RFID chip is very small and dense.

To show how small the chip is, and how technology has changed, I put the RFID chip on top of an 8751 microcontroller die. The 8751 microcontroller is a chip in Intel's popular 8051 family dating from 1983. Note that the circuitry on the RFID chip is denser and the chip is much, much smaller. (The photo looks a bit photoshopped, but it genuinely is the RFID chip sitting on the surface of the 8751 die. I don't know why the RFID chip is pink.)

So, if you ran in the Bay to Breakers, that's the chip that tracked your time during the race. (There aren't a lot of other RFID die photos on the web, but a few are at Bunnie Studios, Zeptobars and ExtremeTech if you want to see more.)

Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface

A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration: how we disassembled the computer and disk drive and fixed a power supply problem, but ran into a showstopper problem with the disk interface.

The Xerox Alto was a revolutionary computer from 1973, designed by computer pioneer Chuck Thacker at Xerox PARC to investigate ideas for personal computing. The Alto was the first computer built around a mouse and GUI, as well as introducing Ethernet and laser printers to the world. The Alto famously inspired Steve Jobs, who used many of its ideas in the Lisa and Macintosh computer.

Alan Kay, whose vision for a personal computer guided the Alto, recently gave an Alto computer to Y Combinator. Getting this system running again is a big effort but fortunately I'm working with a strong team, largely from the IBM 1401 restoration team. Marc Verdiell, Luca Severini, Ron, Carl Claunch, and I started on restoration a few days ago, as shown in Marc's video below.

Disassembling the Alto

We started by disassembling the computer. The Xerox Alto has a metal cabinet about the size of a dorm mini-fridge, with a Diablo hard disk drive on top, and a chassis with power supplies and the circuit boards below. With some tugging, the chassis slides out of the cabinet on rails as you can see in the photo below. At the front are the four cooling fans, normally protected by a decorative panel. Note the unusual portrait layout of the display.

The Xerox Alto II XM 'personal computer'. The card cage below the disk drive has been partially removed. Four cooling fans are visible at the front of it.

With the chassis fully removed, you can see the four switching power supplies on the left, the blue metal boxes. The computer's circuit boards are on the right, not visible in this picture. The wiring for the backplane is visible at right front, with pins connected by wire-wrapped wire connections. This wiring connects the circuit boards together.[1]

The Alto's chassis has been removed. On the left are the four switching power supplies (blue boxes). On the right, the connections for the wire-wrapped backplane are visible. The circuit boards plug into this backplane.

The power supplies

Our first goal was to make sure the power supplies worked after decades of sitting idle. The Alto uses high-efficiency switching power supplies.[2] To explain the power supplies in brief, input power is chopped up thousands of times a second to produce a regulated voltage. Unlike modern computer power supplies, there's a second switching stage (the inverter), which drops the voltage to the desired 15 volts. This was more complexity than I expected, but fortunately the detailed power supply manual was available online, thanks to Al Kossow's bitsavers.[3] We tested each power supply with a resistor as a dummy load and checked that the output voltage was correct. We also used an oscilloscope to make sure the output was stable. All the power supplies worked fine, except for the +15V supply (top center), which had trouble getting up to 15 volts and staying there.

We disassembled the faulty power supply to track down the problem. The photo of the power supply below shows how densely components are crammed into the power supply. Two of the circuit boards have been removed and are at the back. Note the three large filter capacitors at the front.

Switching power supply from the Xerox Alto computer. Two of the control boards have been removed and are visible at back.

We noted signs of overheating on the AC connector, as well as a somewhat sketchy looking repair (a trace replaced by a wire) and some signs of corrosion. Apparently the power supply had problems in the past and had been serviced. We cleaned up the corrosion and it appeared to be superficial.

The power supply disassembled easily for repair, as you can see below. The main board is at the right. The tower of three inductors on the main board is an unusual way of mounting inductors. Three circuit boards (top) plug into the main board. Because the power supply uses discrete components instead of a modern SMPS control IC, it needs a lot of control circuitry. The switching transistors (lower center) are mounted onto metal heat sinks for cooling.

The Alto's switching power supply, disassembled. The main board is in the lower right. The three circuit boards are at top, below the large input capacitors.

The large capacitors were attached with screws, making it easy to remove them for testing. A capacitance meter showed that the three large capacitors had failed, explaining why the power supply had trouble outputting the desired voltage. Ron went off and found replacement capacitors, although they weren't an exact match for the originals. With the new capacitors mounted in place, the power supply worked properly.

Inside the Diablo disk drive

We also looked at the Diablo disk drive, which provides 2.5MB of storage for the Xerox Alto. The first step was removing the disk pack. In normal operation, the front of the drive is locked shut to keep the disk from being removed during use. To remove the disk without powering up the drive, we had to open the drive and manually trip the latch that locks it shut (see Diablo drive manual).

This picture shows the disk pack being reinserted into the drive. Unlike modern hard disk drives, the Alto's disk can be removed from the drive. Users typically used different disks for different tasks — a programming disk, a word processing disk, and so forth. The disk pack is a fairly large white package, resembling a cross between an overgrown Frisbee and a poorly-detailed Star Wars spaceship. The drive's multiple circuit boards are also visible in the photo.[4]

Inserting a 2.5 MB hard disk pack into the Diablo drive used by the Xerox Alto computer.

As the disk pack enters the drive, it opens up to provide access to the disk surface. The photo below shows the exposed surface of the disk, brownish from the magnetizable iron oxide layer over the aluminum platter. The read/write head is visible above the disk's surface, with another head below the disk. The disk stores data in 203 concentric pairs of tracks, with the heads moving in and out together to access each pair of tracks.

Closeup of the hard disk inside the Diablo drive. The read/write head (metal/yellow) is visible above the disk surface (brown).

Although the heads are widely separated during disk pack insertion, they move very close to the disk surface during operation, floating about one thousandth of a millimeter above the surface. The diagram below from the manual helps visualize this minute distance, and illustrates the danger of particles on the disk's surface.

The Diablo disk and why contaminants are bad, from the Alto disk manual.

The disk interface cliffhanger

The final activity of the day was making sure all the Alto's circuit boards were in the right slots and the cables were all hooked up properly.[5] Everything went smoothly until I tried to hook up the Diablo disk drive to the disk interface card: the disk drive cable didn't fit on the card's connector!

The cable to the Alto disk didn't fit onto the disk interface card!

After trying various combinations of cables and edge connectors, we discovered that the rainbow-colored ribbon cable you can see in the lower right above did fit the disk interface card. But instead of going to the Diablo disk drive, this cable went to a connector on the back of the Alto labeled "Tricon". Tricon is the controller for the Trident Disk, a high-capacity disk drive that could be used with the Alto, providing 80 MB instead of the just 2.5 MB that the standard Diablo drive provides. Looking at the disk interface card more closely, we saw it was labeled "Alto II Trident Disk Interface" (upper left corner of the photo below), confirming that it was for the Trident.

Trident Disk Interface card for Xerox Alto computer. (See label in upper left.)

It was a shock to discover the disk interface card was for the Trident drive, since our Alto has the standard Diablo drive, which is completely incompatible with the Trident.[6] We checked all the boards and verified that the system was missing the Diablo interface board. This was a showstopper problem; with the wrong board, the disk drive would be unusable and we wouldn't be able to boot up the system. What could we do? Network boot the Alto? Build a disk simulator? Find a Trident drive on eBay? (We actually found a Trident disk platter on eBay for $129, but no drive.)

Tune in next episode to find out what we did about the disk interface problem. (Spoiler: we found a solution thanks to Al Kossow.)

Notes and references

[1] The physical layout of the power supplies is specified on page 11 of the Alto documentation introduction. On the top are three Raytheon/Sorensen power supplies, +12V (15A), +15V (12A), and -15V (12A). At the bottom is a large LH Research Mighty Mite power supply providing +5V (60A) and -5V (12A).

Why the variety of voltages? Most of the circuitry in the Alto uses 5V, which is standard for TTL chips. The MOS memory chips use +5V, -5V and +12V. The Ethernet card uses +15V and -15V, with +15V powering the transceiver. The disk drive uses +/- 15V.

[2] Steve Jobs claimed that the Apple II's use of a switching power supply was a revolutionary idea ripped off by other computer manufacturers. However, the Alto is just one of many computers that used switching power supplies before Apple (details).

[3] For full details on the power supply operation, see the block diagram. First, the 115V AC line input is converted to 300V DC by a rectifier and voltage doubler. (The voltage doubler is a clever way of supporting both 115V and 230V inputs; using the doubler with 115V. This is why older PCs have a switch on the power supply to select 115V or 230V. Modern power supplies handle a wide input range, and don't require a switch.) Next, the power supply has a chopper, a PWM transistor circuit that chops up the 300V DC, producing a regulated 120V-200V DC, depending on the output load. This goes to the inverter, which drives a step-down/isolation transformer that produces the desired 15V output. A regulation circuit sends feedback to the chopper based on the output voltage. Meanwhile, an entirely separate switching power supply circuit generates voltages (including +150V) used by the power supply internally.

Modern power supplies use a single switching stage in place of the separate chopper and inverter. I believe the two stages were used to reduce the load on the bipolar switching transistors, which don't have the performance of modern MOSFET switching transistors. (As Ron pointed out, modern power supplies often have a PFC (power factor correction) stage for improved efficiency. Thus, the two-stage design has returned, although the stages are entirely different now.)

Modern power supplies use a power supply control IC. The Alto's power supply instead has control circuits built from simple components: transistors, op amps, 555 timers. This is one reason the power supply requires three circuit boards.

[4] The following table from the Alto disk manual gives the stats for the drive.

Statistics on the Diablo 31 disk used with the Xerox Alto computer.

[5] The Alto backplane has 21 slots, not all of which are used in our system. The list of which board goes into which slot is on page 8 of the Alto documentation.

[6] I suspect that the Y Combinator Alto originally had both a Trident drive and a Diablo drive (as well as four Orbit boards to drive a laser printer), and when it was taken out of service, the Trident drive, the Diablo interface board, and the Orbit boards went off somewhere else. This left the Alto with a drive that didn't match the interface card.

For reference, schematics and documentation on the Trident interface board are here. Despite all the chips on the disk interface board, it doesn't do very much, since each TTL chip is fairly simple. The interface board has some counters, one word data buffers, parallel/serial conversion, and a bit of control logic. The Alto was designed to offload many hardware tasks to microcode, so the hard work of disk I/O is performed in microcode (software).