abstract machine: A set of low-level functions and capabilities, provided by some combination of hardware and software, that forms the underpinnings of a system sitting above. For example, the Interlisp-D system, which runs on various machines, consists of a lot of machine-independent stuff sitting on top of a small amount of machine-dependent code. The goals of the machine-dependent part were specified by describing an abstract machine that it must implement. As another example, part of the Cedar project has been the specification of a ``Cedar computer'' as an abstract machine.

Alpine: A transactional file server being built within CSL for use by database systems and other distributed computing applications. Alpine is being built on top of Cedar, and helps support the FS file system. See the blue-and-white report titled ``The Alpine File System'', number CSL-84-4.

Alto: (On its way to being archaic.) A small personal computer with a bitmap display and mouse, designed at PARC; the precursor to D-machines. See the blue-and-white report titled ``Alto: A personal Computer'', number CSL-79-11.

Alto world: An environment created by running an Alto emulator on a D-machine.

AltoFontGuide.Press: A file, available on [Indigo]<Fonts>, that tells all about the existing families of display-screen raster fonts, and describes how they are organized on different subdirectories of [Indigo]<AltoFonts>. Note that the name ``AltoFonts'' is an anachronism, and should really be changed to ``DisplayScreenFonts'' or the like; the same rasters that were drawn for use on Altos work just fine on today's D-machines.

AM: Acronym for the Cedar abstract machine.

ARPA: Acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense. They support, among other things, a network linking research computers: our ARPANET address is simply Xerox.ARPA. It used to be PARC-MAXC and will probably change to Xerox.COM in the near future.

atom: (or ATOM:) Unique identifiers implemented over a global naming space. Two occurrences of the same atom will evaluate to the identical value, rather than just to equivalent values. Atoms have always been part of Interlisp; they were added to Mesa on the way to Cedar. In Cedar, an atom literal is written with a prefixed dollar sign, as in ``$foo''. Each atom has a list of <name, value> pairs associated with it, called its property list.

bank: A unit of measurement of primary storage in an Alto world, equal to 64K 16-bits words, that is, 128K bytes. An Alto II has four banks, while Dorados have at least eight.

bar: A generally thin, generally rectangular, generally invisible region of the screen in which certain generally display-related actions occur, e.g., the scroll bar, the line-select bar.

baseboard: A microcomputer that lives on the lowest printed-circuit board of a Dorado. The baseboard listens to the terminal's boot button, and to various thermometers. Its job is to supervise the rather complex booting sequence necessary for bringing a Dorado up from a cold start. The baseboard announces its state to the outside world by flashing a number (encoded in unary) on a little green light on the Dorado chassis. Signs near each bank of Dorados explain what various numbers of flashes mean.

Bayhill: Another name for Building 96, occupied by part of SDD. The Bayhill building is located on Hillview just before it runs into Arastradero.

BCD: A compiled object program module in Mesa or Cedar; an acronym for Binary Configuration Description.

BCPL: A free-wheeling and typeless system programming language used as the environment for much early Alto programming. Also, the compiler for that language.

BFS: An acronym for Basic File System; the contents of a disk or partition used by an Alto world. Also a standard software package for low-level management of an Alto file system.

Binder: BCD's export services to their clients, and, in turn, import various services from other BCD's. The process of resolving these inter-module references is called binding, and the Binder is the program that does it. Actually, the loader can handle many of the easy cases of binding on the fly, as part of the loading process; but for complex stuff, you need the Binder. The Binder accepts compiled modules (with extension ``.bcd'') and binding instructions in the form of a configuration description (with extension ``.config''); it produces another ``.bcd'' as output.

BITBLT: (pronounced ``bit-blit''). A complex instruction used for moving and possibly modifying a rectangular bitmap. The ``BLT'' part is an acronym for BLock Transfer.

bitmap: Generally refers to a representation of a graphical entity as a sequence of bits directly representing image intensity at the points of a raster. The display hardware and microcode on an Alto or D-machine process what is essentially a bitmap of the image to be displayed. At PARC, bitmaps are normally stored word-aligned, and in row-major order.

blue-and-white: A report that has been cleared for distribution outside Xerox, and published in a blue and white cover. Such reports have identifying numbers formed by concatenating the laboratory acronym, the year, and a small integer. One of my favorites is the Laurel Manual, by Douglas K. Brotz, number CSL-81-6; I especially recommend Chapter 6. CSL blue-and-whites are stored on bookshelves in the CSL Alcove. A list giving the titles and numbers of all of the blue-and-whites is available from the PARC Technical Information Center (TIC).

boot: Short for ``bootstrap'', which is in turn short for ``bootstrap load''. Refers to the process of loading and starting a program on a machine whose main memory has undefined contents.

boot button: The small button behind the keyboard used (sometimes in conjunction with the keyboard) to boot some program into execution. On Dolphins or Dorados, there are other more potent boot buttons on the chassis, in addition to the boot button behind the keyboard.

boot file: A file that contains a bootable program. Used to start Cedar, as well as various games and other useful programs available from the NetExec in the Alto world.

boot server: A computer on the network that provides a retrieval service for certain stand-alone programs (which are encapsulated as boot files). See NetExec.

bootlights: (archaic) A screen pattern resembling a city skyline. Occurs occasionally in the Alto world when some erroneous unanticipated condition arises, e.g., getting a parity error in a BCPL program on a disk that doesn't have Swat.

Bravo: (archaic) An integrated text editor and document formatting program that runs on the Alto; a vital program that nevertheless is no longer maintained or supported.

BravoBug: (archaic) A program used when Bravo crashes to replay the editing actions up to the point of the crash.

BravoX: A successor to Bravo written in Butte with somewhat greater functionality and a somewhat richer interface. Warning!: BravoX source files are stored in a weird and wonderful format that almost NO programs other than BravoX can handle. Also, BravoX runs, at the moment, only on Alto II's and (perhaps?) Dolphins.

break page: A header page that divides one printed file from another in the output of a Spruce printer. If Spruce encountered any difficulties during the printing run, it will inform you of them on the break page.

Bringover: A button in DFTool which retrieves files from remote file servers to one's local disk; Bringover reads ``.df'' files in order to figure out what versions of what files should be retrieved, and where in the great wide electronic world they might be found.

bug: A computing term for a non-feature, something that is not as intended. Sometimes used in a different sense to refer to the act of pointing at something with the mouse, and then clicking a mouse button; but this usage is frowned upon by 100% of our Usage Panel (namely me: I recommend using the verb ``click'' instead in this context, since I think that ``bug'' is already an overloaded word).

bug award: Refers to a occasional custom within CSL wherein those brave souls responsible for ferreting out the cruelest and most intricate bugs in critically important systems are rewarded for their efforts by being presented with a cute little bug-shaped sticker that they can then display on their office nameplate or elsewhere. A bug award is the moral equivalent of a gold star. If the sticker consists of a background from which a bug has been excised, then the award is an ``inverse bug award'', and serves to praise its recipient for producing code that is notably free of insect infestations.

Building 32: Located on Hanover Street, north of Page Mill. Once called PARC-place, when it was occupied by parts of PARC.

Building 34: A part of PARC, located on Hillview, just across Coyote Hill from the Building 35, the home of the ICL.

Building 35: The main building of PARC, located at the intersection of Coyote Hill and Hillview. The site of the cafeteria.

Building 37: A part of PARC, located on Hanover Street, north of Page Mill, and just south of Building 32. The site of the Electronic Model Shop.

Building 96: A part of OSD, located where Hillview runs into Arastradero; also called the Bayhill building. Current home of some parts of SDD.

Butte: A compiler for BCPL that outputs Mesa-style byte codes instead of Nova assembly code; also, the byte codes themselves, and the microcode that implements them.

button: A small area on the screen that reacts when clicked with the mouse. In Viewers, buttons are rectangular areas labelled with a word or phrase; they are organized into menus.

byte code: Lisp, Mesa, Cedar, Smalltalk, and Butte at PARC compile into directly executable languages that are stack oriented, and whose op codes are usually one byte long. Such an instruction is called a byte code. These byte codes are in turn interpreted by special microcode on each of our various machines.

Cabernet: A particular mail server that is part of the Grapevine distributed transport mechanism, located in the CSL machine room.

caret: A blinking pointer, indicating where keyboard characters will appear when typed.

catch phrase: A chunk of Mesa or Cedar code that is prepared to handle a certain type of exceptional condition. The best way to think of a catch phrase is as the body of a procedure variable that is dynamically bound. Such procedures variables are called signals. If you suspect that an exceptional condition might arise, and you think that you know what to do if it does, you specify this response as a catch phrase; that is, you bind a procedure value to the signal, which is a procedure variable. If any procedure that you call notices that the condition has in fact arisen, it will notify the world by ``raising the signal'', which should be thought of as a procedure call to the catch phrase that you specified. (This method of explaining signals is a minor facet of the religion espoused in the CLRM.)

Cedar: A large project in CSL to build a programming environment for CSL's future applications. Also the name of that environment. Also the name of the programming language upon which it is built. The Cedar language is a variant of Mesa augmented by garbage collection, atoms, and run-time types. The design of the Cedar environment was strongly influenced by the programming environment and services available in Interlisp and Smalltalk. For a discussion of the goals of Cedar and a tour through the environment, see the blue-and-white report titled ``The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination'', number CSL-83-11.

CedarGraphics: A subroutine package of graphic primitives, built by the imaging group, that forms an important part of Cedar. Its design was heavily influenced by the results of experimental systems written in JaM.

Chardonnay: A Grapevine server.

Chat: A program that provides teletype-like ``interactive'' access to a remote computer on the network. Most programming environments include this capability in some form; both Alto and Cedar include programs actually named ``Chat''. Chat is mainly used to communicate with MAXC and IFS servers.

Checkpoint: A method used in Cedar to preserve the state of your computing world. Taking a Checkpoint involves preserving a shapshot of the current state of the virtual memory, but not of the file system. If, after taking a Checkpoint, something bad happens and your Cedar system gets wedged, the command RollBack will return you to the earlier clean state of your virtual memory; but changes to the file system made between the Checkpoint and the subsequent RollBack, such as storing edited versions of files, will not be undone.

Cheshire: A subsidiary of Xerox. They make a machine that binds stacks of paper into booklets by melting glue and letting it be absorbed by the edges of the paper. There are Cheshire binders in CSL and in the PARC TIC.

Chromalin: The trade name of a fancy color printing process used with the PlateMaker for creating high-resolution color prints from Press files or PD files.

Chipmunk: A D-machine Mesa program for interactively creating and editing integrated circuit designs. Chipmunk makes use of a color display in addition to the normal black-and-white one. It is a successor to Icarus.

ChipNDale: A Cedar program for interactively creating and editing integrated circuit designs. It is a successor to Chipmunk.

Cholla: A Laurel-based IC fabrication line control program, which is used in ICL.

CIFS: An acronym for Cedar Interim File System. CIFS was used within Cedar to manage a portion of the local disk as a cache containing readonly copies of remote files. This function and others are now provided by FS. CIFS was the first CSL system to allow the components of a hierarchical file name to be separated with simple slashes instead of with square brackets and angle brackets; the clumsier brackets are being used in this document (sigh) for compatibility with the past.

Clearinghouse: The analog of the Grapevine registration database in the NS world. That is, a machine running Star talks to the local Clearinghouse in order to find out how to talk to a particular file server or print server.

click: A manipulation of a mouse button. Pushing and releasing a mouse button several times in quick succession is sometimes called a ``double-click'', ``triple-click'', etc. as appropriate. The phrases ``click-hold'' and ``double-click-hold'' are also sometimes heard.

client: A program (as opposed to a person) that avails itself of the services of another program or system. For instance, Laurel is a client of Grapevine. See user.

Clover: A Dover located in CSL.

CloverFonts.Press: A file, available on [Indigo]<Fonts>, that lists by family name, face, size, and rotation all of the fonts in Clover's font dictionary. That is, this file lists the fonts that you can print with; for the fonts that you can see on your screen, see AltoFontGuide.Press instead. To see the characters of the fonts in all their glory, check out the book located on top of Clover called CloverCharacters.Press.

CLRM: Acronym for the Cedar Language Reference Manual. This document isn't exactly easy bedtime reading, but it is the most authoritative description currently available of the behavior of Cedar programs in interesting and subtle cases. The CLRM also attempts to convert you to a particular religion regarding the proper design of a polymorphic language within the Algol tradition. To get the good dope about current Cedar without spending the time necessary to undergo religious conversion, skip immediately to Chapters 3 and 4 of the CLRM.

CMOS: Complementary-Metal-Oxide Semiconductor integrated circuit technology. A technology that is being used to build the Dragon. This technology minimizes power dissipation thereby offering the promise that Dragon, unlike Dorados, will be able to reside in people's offices. ICL has a fast turnaround CMOS fabrication facility to support creation of such circuits.

CoCedar: A world-swap debugger for Cedar.

color display: A CRT display with red, green, and blue phosphors. Griffin and ChipNDale both use the color display, and the color display is also available to users of Cedar with a minimum of hassle through the good auspices of the Cedar ColorDisplay.

ColorDisplay: A component of Cedar that provides a command interface for using a color display.

Com.cm: A file used by the Alto Executive to store the current command being executed. See Rem.cm.

CommandTool: Also called the Commander: a stream-oriented "glass teletype" command-line processor. It is much like the Unix (TM) shell, or the Alto or Tajo Executives.

Commons: The room in which many of the talks and meetings in CSL, including Dealer, take place. Sometimes refered to as the ``beanbag room''.

component: Among many other things, a chunk of software that is distributed as part of a Cedar release.

config: A source file that tells the Binder how to assemble modules into a complete system.

CoPilot: A world-swap debugger for Pilot.

CopyDisk: A stand-alone program used to transfer an Alto BFS, that is, the entire contents of an Alto disk or partition. May be used between computers or on a single computer with multiple disk drives.

Corporate Internet: An emerging Internet internal to Xerox making use of XNS technology.

create date: When said of a file, the date and time that the information contained in this particular version of this particular file was created. Create dates are generally stored accurate to the nearest second. This makes them sufficiently unique that the pair <file name, file version's create date> can serve as a unique identifier for a particular pile of bits.

credentials: Proof that you are who you say you are; usually your R-name and the corresponding password.

CSL: Acronym for Computer Science Laboratory, a part of PARC, located on the second floor of Building 35.

CSL Notebook: A mechanism for distributing, indexing, and generally sharing the documentary output of folk in CSL.

cursor: A small picture on the display that tracks the motions of the mouse.

Cyan: An IFS server in PARC, used by CSL to store project software files.

Cypress: A database package based upon an entity-value-relationship model of data, and written in Cedar. Walnut, Hickory, and Squirrel are clients of Cypress. See the blue-and-white report titled ``Design and Implementation of a Relationship-Entity-Datum Data Model'', number CSL-83-4.

D-machine: A generic name, referring to any of the current machines within Xerox that implement the PrincOps architecture: Dandelions, Dicentras, Dolphins, and Dorados are the primary D-machines.

D0: (``D-zero'', not ``DO'') An obsolete name for the Dolphin, a D-machine.

Daisy: A Dover located in the Bayhill building.

Dandelion: The name of the processor that is in the Star products; an example of a D-machine.

Dandetiger: A Dandelion upgraded with extended control store, optional floating point, etc.

dead: Either not currently operational (said of a piece of hardware), or operational but not currently undergoing continued development and support (said of bodies of software).

Dealer: The name of CSL's weekly meeting, occurring on Wednesday afternoons from 1:15 until 2:45 (or so) in the Commons; also used to refer to the person speaking at that meeting. Giving such a presentation is referred to as ``giving a Dealer'' or sometimes ``Dealing''.

DDS: (archaic) Acronym for Descriptive Directory System. An Alto subsystem providing sophisticated manipulation of the Alto file directory system. See also Neptune.

design group: A group in CSL working on Dragon, VSLI chip design, and VLSI design tools in Cedar.

DF files: A collection of programs for describing the files needed to build a complicated system, for automatically retrieving these files from remote file servers to the local disk, and for storing them back later. Unlike the more grand and glorious system models to come, DF files primarily addresses the problems engendered by our current feudal collection of file systems. The letters ``DF'' are an acronym for Description Files, which suggests that the phrase ``DF files'' is redundant. DFTool is used to manipulate and create these files.

DFTool: A Cedar tool to operate on DF files.

Dicentra: A recent and inexpensive D-machine. The Dicentra essentially consists of the Dandelion's CPU squeezed onto one Multibus card, and communicating with memory and with I/O device controllers over the Multibus.

dirtball: A small, perhaps struggling outsider; not in the major or even the minor leagues. For example, ``Xerox is not a dirtball company''.

distribution list: A list of R-names to which mail can be addressed. In some cases, Maintain can be used to add oneself to interesting DL's, such as ``MesaFolklore^.pa''. If Maintain responds that you aren't allowed to do that, the correct recourse is to send a polite message to ``Owners-MesaFolklore^.pa'', asking that they please add you to their list. For more details about distribution lists, try either the Laurel manual or the document [Ivy]<Laurel>Maintain.Press, which describes the Alto and Tajo versions of Maintain.

DiskDescriptor: A file that contains the disk allocation information used by an Alto file system.

DL: Acronym for Distribution List; see distribution list.

DLS: Acronym for Data Line Scanner: an Alto equipped with lots of modems plus other hardware and microcode to allow dialing into and out of the Internet.

DMT.boot: Acronym for Display Memory Tester. A memory diagnostic for the Alto world. DMT is automatically booted from the network by the Alto Executive after the Alto has been idle for about 20 minutes. DMT accepts various commands; try pushing the "S" key, and also try typing shift-swat. Designing cursors for DMT is a popular sport: send your suggestion as a list of 16 octal numbers to David Boggs (Boggs.PA), along with a suggested title line and an indication of whether you want to be credited by name.

Dolphin: A D-machine; once called the D0. More flexible than a Dandelion, but also slower and more expensive.

Dorado: A high-performance D-machine, designed by CSL and coveted by all and sundry. See the blue-and-white report titled ``The Dorado: A High-Performance Personal Computer'', number CSL-81-1.

Dover: Generic name for a type of 384 bpi laser-scan printer built on the Xerox 7000 xerographic engine and connected to an Alto by means of a Orbit interface. Successor to EARS. Dovers are normally driven by the program Spruce.

Dragon: A new multi-processor machine being custom designed using CMOS technology by the design group of CSL. It is hoped that the Dragon will satisfy our ambitions to have ``a Dorado in a shoe box''.

Draw: (archaic) An Alto subsystem that permits interactive construction of pictures composed of lines, curves, and text. Draw users may be interested to note that a program ReDraw exists that converts Draw source files into Press files that will print without the jaggies on a Dover. Users of Alto emulators on D-machines must use DDraw and ReDDraw instead.

Dumper.boot: (archaic) A file used for desperation debugging in an Alto world. Dumps (most of) the current core image to Swatee for subsequent inspection by a debugger.

DWIM: Acronym for Do What I Mean: a facility intended to help the programmer by making LISP do what you mean, rather than what you say.

EARS: (archaic) Acronym for Ether Alto Research SLOT. An obsolete prototype laser-scan printer built on the Xerox 7000 xerographic engine and equipped with a hardware character generator. (Interesting to some as an example of a third level acronym: the S in EARS stands for SLOT, and the L in SLOT stands for LASER, and LASER itself is an acronym!)

EditTool: A menu-oriented command interface to the Tioga editor, providing complete access to Tioga's functionality, including the commands that you can't type (either because they can't be typed, or because you have forgotten how to type them).

EFTP: A venerable PUP-based protocol now mostly used to transfer print files to print servers.

Electronic Model Shop: Located on Hanover street in Building 37, this group of folks do small-scale production runs of computer equipment for PARC. Frequently called the Garage.

EmPress: An Alto subsystem used to convert text files to Press format and ship them to a Press print server.

emulator: A technique in which one computer is programmed to imitate another. Fast imitations are called emulators, while sufficiently slow ones are called simulators.

EOS: Acronym for Electro-Optical Systems; an organization located in Pasadena that was formerly a part of Xerox. The defense contracting portion of EOS was recently sold by Xerox for 40 megabucks. The portion of EOS that built Scientific Information Systems is now SIS; they are the ones who are marketing D-machines running Interlisp and Smalltalk to the outside world.

Ernestine: A particular Lily server located in Building 35.

Ethernet: The communication line connecting many computers (with compatible interfaces) together. Strictly speaking, an Ethernet is a single, continuous piece of co-axial cable, but the term is sometimes applied to the entire network accessible through the cooperation of Gateways (which is more correctly called an Internet). Ethernets come in two flavors: the original Ethernet, now called the Experimental Ethernet, was built within PARC and runs at 3 MBits/sec. The Ethernet that has been proposed as a communication standard is a re-engineering that runs at 10 MBits/sec. PARC currently has Ethernets of both these flavors running around, as well as a special 1.5MBits/sec Ethernet used by the Etherphones. See the blue-and-white report titled ``The Ethernet Local Network: Three Reports'', number CSL-80-2.

Etherphone: A box of magic widgets that can replace your office telephone, giving you much greater functionality by taking advantage of the power of computing in general, and of your personal multi-function workstation in particular. An Etherphone has a microphone, a speaker, digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters, a connection to Ma Bell, an Ethernet interface, and several microprocessors to tie them all together. The Etherphone is a recent product of the Voice Project within CSL. The existence of the Etherphone should make it easy to write lots of exciting experimental systems (any volunteers to write a CedarVoice interface?).

Executive: A distinguished Alto subsystem that provides simple commands to inspect and manipulate the file system directory, and to initiate other subsystems.

export: A Mesa or Cedar program that provides (either some or all of) the services described in an interface is said to export that interface.

file extension: The portion of a file name that appears following a period (possibly null). By convention, a number of extensions are reserved to indicate the type of data in the file, though not all subsystems are consistent in their use of extensions. Some commonly encountered extensions are:

file name: See file extension and path name for information about the local conventions for file names.

file server: A computer on the network that provides a file storage and retrieval service. IFS and Alpine are different types of file servers.

FLG: (pronounced "flug") In LISP programs, a switch that customizes a program's behavior to an individual user's working habits.

fog index: A measure of prose obscurity. Units are years of education required in order to understand the measured prose.

font: An assortment of characters all of one size and style; more precisely, a mapping from a set of character code numbers to a consistent collection of graphic images.

Fonts.widths: A file containing character-width information for a large number of fonts. Used by some programs that do text formatting while producing Press files. The standard source is [Indigo]<Fonts>Fonts.Widths. Other programs appeal to separate ``.tfm'' files, one for each font, as their source of information about character metrics.

foo: The first meta-syntactic variable. The second is ``bar''. There is a tie for third between ``fum'' and ``baz''. The words ``foo'' and ``bar'' are cognates, both derived from ``fubar'', an acronym popular in the U.S. Navy and used by early computer programmers employed by the Navy, possibly as a technical term describing the state of a system.

Football: A two-person game in Cedar; a many person brawl when not in Cedar.

format: An attribute of a node in a Tioga document. Examples might be ``long quotation'', or ``item in a bulletted list''. The effect of the various formats is defined by the style.

FS: A file directory system in Cedar; FS replaced CIFS and the Common Software Directory (a part of Pilot).

FTP: Acronym for File Transfer Protocol (or Program). An Alto world program that provides a convenient user interface to the file transfer protocol, enabling the transfer of files between co-operating computers on the Internet.

Garage: A nickname for the Electronic Model Shop.

Gateway: A computer serving as a forwarding link between separate Ethernets. Gateways may also perform certain server functions, such as name lookup.

germ: A small part of Pilot that runs first; the germ handles bootstrap loading, inloading and outloading memory images during worldswaps, teledebugging, and the like.

Grapevine: The distributed electronic message transport system; it has a set of protocols all its own, and provides various server functions such as authentication. See the blue-and-white report titled ``Grapevine: Two Papers and a Report'', number CSL-83-12.

Griffin: An illustration program in Mesa and Cedar, a successor to Draw. Excellent on filled areas, and handles color. Griffin was the source of many of the pretty pictures hanging near Lilac.

group: (when referring to Grapevine) A set of R-names. The standard interpretation of a group is a distribution list. For example, CSL^.PA is the group of all people in CSL, in case they all should get copies of a message. Groups can also be used for other purposes, such as access control. The R-names that constitute a group are called its members. In addition, a group has friends and owners: a friend is someone who may add or delete herself from the group, while an owner may add or delete anyone from the group.

Hardy: A Tool that provides the functionality of Laurel, that is, mail sending and receiving, within Tajo; a client of Grapevine.

Hickory: A reminder and calendar system based on the Cypress database in Cedar.

Hornet: Generic name for a family of 300 bpi laser-scanned printers, built on top of 2600 copiers.

Iago: The disk utility program for Cedar. Useful for manipulating the local disk, such as creating volumes and installing Cedar.

Ibis: An IFS server in SDD/Palo Alto.

Icarus: (archiac) An Alto-based program for creating and editing integrated circuit designs graphically and interactively.

icon: A small image representing some concept. Used extensively in Star and Cedar.

Idun: An IFS server in SDD/Palo Alto: the home file server of the Pilot group.

ICL: Acronym for Integrated Circuit Laboratory, a part of PARC, located in Building 34.

IDL: Old acronym for Integrated Design Laboratory, now the design group of CSL.

IFS: Acronym for Interim File System. An Alto-based file server. Many IFS servers exist on various Ethernets, including Cyan, Ivy, Indigo, Ibis, Iris, Idun, Igor, Phylum, and Erie.

IFU: Acronym for Instruction Fetch Unit; many computers have them.

Igor: An IFS server in SDD/Palo Alto: the home file server of the Mesa group. This name should be pronounced ``Eye-gore'', as in the movie Young Frankenstein.

imaging group: Formerly the Imaging Sciences Laboratory. They are now part of CSL.

Imager: A new implementation of the CedarGraphics package that is under development.

implementation module: A Mesa or Cedar module that actually provides a set of services, as opposed to an interface module, which simply specifies exactly what those services are to be.

Indigo: An IFS server in PARC, used by CSL to store project software files.

[Indigo]<Alto>: A directory on which standard Alto (BCPL) programs and subsystems are stored. Only object code files (extension .br) and runnable files (extension .run) are stored here; source files and documentation are stored on [Indigo]<AltoSource> and [Indigo]<AltoDocs>, respectively.

[Indigo]<AltoDocs>: A directory on which documentation for various Alto subsystems are stored (generally with extension .press or .tty).

[Indigo]<AltoFonts>: A directory on which screen fonts for the Alto are stored (extensions .al, .strike, or .ks). Subdirectories are used on this directory to distinguish various families of display screen fonts that have accumulated over the years.

[Indigo]<AltoSource>: A directory on which source versions of standard Alto programs are stored.

[Indigo]<BasicDisks>: A directory on which the standard starting configurations for Alto disks are stored, as files with extension ``.bfs''. The normal way to initialize a new Alto world is to use CopyDisk to retrieve one of these disk images.

[Indigo]<Cedar®>: A directory containing the Cedar source code and documentation, where ® denotes the version number. e.g. ``6.0''.

[Indigo]<Cedar®>Documentation>: A directory containing the on-line documentation for Cedar.

[Indigo]<Cedar®>Top>: A directory containing top level .df files for components of the Cedar release.

[Indigo]<Fonts>: A directory containing various documents of printing interest, including Fonts.widths. You might be interested in CloverFonts.Press, or AltoFontGuide.Press.

[Indigo]<Forms>: (archaic) A directory containing files that are usable as templates (in Bravo) for various kinds of documents (e.g., memos, letters, reports).

[Indigo]<PrintingDocs>: A directory containing documentation related to printing and graphics facilities such as Press files and font file formats.

input focus: Suppose that the user types a key, while operating in an environment that supports multiprogramminglots of things going on at once, each in their own window. Which program was the keystroke intended for? Different systems have different conventions on this important point. In some releases of Tajo, the window in which the cursor is currently located gets the keystroke. But in several other systems, including Cedar, there is a concept called the ``input focus'' that is passed around among the running programs; whatever program has the input focus gets the keystrokes. Left-clicking a mouse button inside of a window often has the side effect of giving that window the input focus.

Inscript: A mechanism for keeping track of user input to a program in a general way (key strokes, mouse clicks, and the like), used within Cedar.

install: A term applied to the Alto Operating System and a number of subsystems (notably Bravo), referring to a procedure whereby certain configuration options are established. Frequently, what is really going on is that the program being installed is salting away somewhere the current hard disk addresses of the pages of important files, so that later access to those files can avoid the tedious operations of looking up the file in a directory and chaining through disk headers to get to the right place within the file.

Intelnet: The Xerox corporate phone system, accessible by starting your dialing with the digit 8. Not to be confused with the Internet.

interface: A formal contract between pieces of a system describing a collection of services to be provided. A provider of these services is said to ``implement the interface''; a consumer of them is called a ``client of the interface''.

interface module: In Mesa and Cedar, interfaces are written down as a special kind of source file, starting with the word ``DEFINITIONS'' instead of ``PROGRAM''. This explicit encoding of an interface is called an interface module.

Interlisp: A dialect of Lisp with a large library of facilities, as witnessed by Interlisp's famous 15-pound reference manual (would that Cedar were so well documented!).

Interlisp-D: An implementation of Interlisp on D-machines, done by a group within PARC. It provides network facilities and high-level graphics primitives. See the blue-and-white report entitled ``Papers on Interlisp-D'', number CIS-5 (SSL-80-4) Revised.

Internet: Many Ethernets and phone lines connected by Gateways form an Internet. Xerox currently operates two internets: the Research Internet and the Corporate Internet.

InterPress: A print file format standard: a second cut at the same issues addressed by Press format.

InterScript: A standard format for the interchange of editable documents that is currently under development.

Iris: An IFS server in SDD/Palo Alto, which serves as the official source of released Pilots.

ISL: A new acronym for the Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Formerly called the Cognitive and Instruction Sciences group. Home of many of the builders of Interlisp-D. Also, an old acronym for what used to be called the Imaging Science Laboratory, which now exists as the imaging group in CSL.

Ivy: An IFS server in PARC, used by CSL mainly to store personal files.

jaggies: The annoying sharp corners visible when smooth curves are imaged on a raster device without sufficient resolution.

JaM: Acronym for John (Warnock) and Martin (Newell). An interactive language, similar to the language Forth, with a simple, stack-oriented execution model; equipped with lots of graphic operations as primitives; implemented in Mesa.

JaMGraphics: A component of an imaging group release which provides JaM commands for all the CedarGraphics features. Creating JaM pictures with JaMGraphics can be very addictive.

Jedi: A Raven at PARC.

Juniper: (archaic) An Alto-based distributed file system, built within CSL.

Juno: A constraint-based system for interactive graphics in Cedar.

junta: A technique for eliminating layers of the Alto Operating System that are not required by a particular subsystem.

Kanji: A Dover in Building 34.

Lampson: A unit of speech rate. 1 Lampson is defined to be Butler's maximum sustained speed. For practical applications, the milliLampson is a more appropriate unit.

Larch: A family of specification languages.

Laurel: An Alto-based, display-oriented program that provides access to the facilities of Grapevine for sending and receiving mail. Succeeded by Walnut in the Cedar environment.

Leaf: A page-level file access protocol supported by some IFS's.

level: There is a tree structure imposed upon the nodes that make up a Tioga document, and the Tioga editor can be informed to suppress the display of all nodes deeper than a certain level. In combination with scrolling, the levels commands in Tioga provide a convenient way to navigate in a well-structured document.

level i system: (for i  [1..3]). A terminology for classifying (software) systems according to their intended user community:

Librarian: A Tajo program for check-in/check-out of the modules of a large Mesa system, used in SDD; also, a server for this program.

Lilac: A Puffin located in CSL, right next to Clover.

Lily: A program that provides teletype-style access to the mail sitting in one's Grapevine mailbox. Lily is designed to help out those folks who, because of travel or whatever, are unable to use their personal computers and either Laurel, Hardy, or Walnut. Also, a server that runs this program.

logical volume: A portion of a physical volume that is being used to support a Pilot environment: the Pilot equivalent of a partition.

look: An attribute of a character or string of characters in various editors, including Bravo and Tioga. ``Bold'' and ``italic'' are examples of Bravo's typographic looks, while ``emphasis'' and ``quotation'' are examples of the functional looks espoused by Tioga. The meaning of looks in Tioga, like the meaning of formats, is defined by the style.

Loops: A layer of software on top of Interlisp that turns it into an object-oriented environment tailored for building rule-based expert systems.

Lotus: Internal development name for the 1075 Xerox copier.

Lupine: The translator used to generate RPC stubs so that Cedar modules can call procedures located on remote machines.

Maggie: A tape server; that is, a machine on the Internet with tape drives that it will let a requesting machine use.

Magic: Acronym for Multiple Analyses of the Geometry of Integrated Circuits. A system for dealing with VLSI designs: printing them, converting them among formats, examining them with various programs.

Maintain: A program for updating Grapevine registration information. There are two versions of Maintain. One, with a widely reviled teletype-style user interface, is available within Laurel, or as a
Tool in Tajo. It is documented in the file [Ivy]<Laurel>Maintain.Press. The other, with a nifty buttons-style interface, is available in Cedar. It is not yet documented.

MakeConfig: A program that reads Mesa configs and bcds and produces a collection of commands that will compile and bind the many modules of a system in the correct manner to build a consistent system.

Marion: A Librarian server in SDD/Palo Alto.

Markup: A dead Alto subsystem for editing Press files.

MAXC: (archaic) Acronym for Multi-Access Xerox Computer (pronounced ``Max''). A locally produced computer that was functionally similar to the DEC PDP-10. At one time, there were two MAXC's, named Maxc1 and Maxc2, but now they have been decommissioned.

memory smash: Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits.

Menlo: A Dover located in the imaging area.

menu: A collection of text strings, buttons, or icons on a display screen generally used to represent a set of possible actions.

Mesa: A PASCAL-like, strongly typed, system programming language developed by CSL and SDD.

Mesa Development Environment: (or MDE:) Officially known as the Xerox Development Environment, this package of software is used by SDD to develop other software in Mesa; combines the Tajo user interface with the compiler, binder, packager, and other system software running on top of Pilot.

MesaNetExec: A Mesa implementation of the NetExec; valuable because it knows how to load Othello.

MetaFont: A font-designing language built by Don Knuth at Stanford, and used to generate fonts for use with TEX.

Microswitch keyboard: Microswitch is a company that makes keyboards. The standard Alto keyboard, also in use at PARC on D-machines, is made by Microswitch.

MIG: An acronym for Master Image Generator: a high-resolution laser-scanning printer, based on a photographic process. The MIG-1 can run up to 2000 bpi, while the slightly different MIG-3 runs at about 800 bpi. Also called the Platemaker.

Mockingbird: A music system that runs on a Dorado with an attached audio synthesizer and its keyboard. The goal of Mockingbird is to relieve the serious composer of some of the clerical burden of writing out scores for music as it being composed. For more details, see the blue-and-white report ``Mockingbird: A Composer's Amanuensis'', number CSL-83-2.

mode: A special state through which certain user interfaces must pass in order to perform certain functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a document in
Bravo, one must type the ``I'' key, which invokes the ``Insert'' command. The effect of this command is to put Bravo into ``insert mode'', in which typing the ``I'' key has a quite different effect (to whit, it inserts an ``I'' into the document). One must then hit another special key, ``ESC'', in order to leave ``insert mode''. Modes are locally viewed as generally evil.

modeless: Describes a user interface that is free of modes. In such an interface, pressing a particular key always has essentially the same effect. Laurel was the first local system with an approximately modeless editor interface; the Tioga editing interface is very similar.

mouse: A type of pointing device with which many personal computers come equipped. The switches on the mouse are called ``buttons'' to distinguish them from the ``keys'' on the keyboard.

mouse-ahead: Analogous to typeahead, except refers to mouse clicks rather than to key strokes. Can become very confusing to non-wizards, as there is no analog of the backspace key for mouse clicks, that is, no way to cancel unwanted mouse clicks.

Multibus: An Intel standard specifying the physical and electrical characteristics of a bus by which various boards in small computers can communicate. Many useful boards that plug into a Multibus are available, such as Ethernet cards and disk controller cards. The Dicentra is a D-machine that uses the Multibus.

name lookup: In the context of network communications, the process of mapping a string of characters to a network address. Also, the protocol that defines the mechanism for performing such a mapping.

name lookup server: A computer that implements the name lookup protocol.

Nebula: A time server on the Internet that is equipped with an antenna to listen to time broadcasts made by a synchronous satellite, and hence has excellent long-term reliability. There is a display showing Nebula's opinion of the time in the same room as Clover: just the thing for setting your digital watch.

Neptune: An Alto subsystem providing more sophisticated manipulation of the file directory system than is available with the Executive. See also DDS.

NetExec.boot: A mini-Executive usable on an Alto without a spinning disk and obtainable directly over the Ethernet (from a boot server). The NetExec makes available a number of useful stand-alone programs, including CopyDisk, Scavenger, FTP, a number of diagnostics, and lots of neat games.

network address: A unique identifier for any computer in an Internet, often a pair of numbers <network number, host number>.

node: A chunk of text in a Tioga document: each heading and paragraph in a document froms a node, and the nodes are hierarchically structured. Node-structured documents are easier to browse, using the levels commands in Tioga. Note: you can't have two nodes on the same line.

Nucleus: The virtual memory and file system base for Cedar.

Nursery: A large room in CSL, across from the Commons; so named because it was to be where new printers would be nursed to life, and also where fresh blood (summer interns and the like) would be housed. The funny windows were intended to make it convenient to hold demonstrations in the Nursery with some of the audience on the outside, looking in.

object-oriented: Describes a philosophy about how programs should be structured that finds its purest expression in the Smalltalk system. An object is a little pile of private data together with a collection of procedures by which other folks are allowed to ask the object to do something. Other folks must not play with the data directly, but instead are required to interact with the object only by calling its procedures (or, in Smalltalk parlance, sending it messages.) Think about complex numbers as a trivial example: A non-object-oriented programmer would probably represent a complex number as a record containing two real numbers. An object-oriented programmer would be tempted to represent a complex number as a record containing public fields and private fields. The values of the public fields would be procedures, with field names such as: AddToMe, MyXCoord, MyYCoord, NegateMe, MyMagnitude, and the like. The private fields in the standard implementation of complex number would be simply two reals, named X and Y. The advantage of the object-oriented approach is that someone else can come along later and implement a new flavor of complex number that uses polar coordinates in the private fields, and previous programs that dealt with complex numbers will not have to be changed.

OIS: An acronym for Office Information Systems: a name for a concept, a type of product, and (perhaps) a market, not a particular organization.

OPD: An acronym for Office Products Division, located mostly in Dallas. They make and sell 820's and the like; see products.

Orbit: A high performance Alto-based image generator designed to merge source rasters into a raster output stream for a SLOT printer (e.g., Dover). So named because it ORs bits into buffers.

OS: Acronym for Operating System. Generally used to refer to the Alto Operating System, which is stored in the file Sys.boot. Rarely used locally to refer to the operating system of the same name that runs on IBM 360/370 computers.

OSD: An acronym for Office Systems Division, of which SDD is a part; they deal with the higher end of the office market, in contrast to OPD.

Othello: A network-bootable Pilot utility, good for initializing logical volumes and the like.

page (on a disk): A unit of length: an Alto or Pilot page is 512 bytes, while an IFS page is 2048 bytes.

PARC: Acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.

partition: A chunk of a large local disk that is being used to emulate the largest system disk that the Alto OS allows. A Dorado has five or nineteen partitions, while a Dolphin has two. Partitions are numbered starting at 1; the phrase ``partition 0'' refers to the current default partition. The current partition in use is determined by the contents of some registers that belong to the disk microcode. You can change these registers with the ``partition.~'' command available in the Executive and in the NetExec. A (14-sector) partition has 22,736 Alto pages (11.6 MBtyes). It took a little adroit shoehorning to fit two full partitions onto a Dolphin's disk: it turns out that a Shugart 4000 has just one too few cylinders to squeeze in two full partitions. So we have to ask the heads to seek off the end of the advertised disk (on the inside, it happens), and put one more cylinder in there! Ah, the joys of hardware hacking...

PasMesa: A program that more or less compiles Pascal source into Mesa source, and hence assists in importing Pascal programs into our environment; developed in CSL.

path name: The complete name of a file, including the
file server and directory or subdirectory on which it is storedeverything you need to know to get the file. In the old style of writing (Alto and IFS), a path name consists of a machine name in square brackets followed by a directory name in angle brackets, optionally followed by one or more subdirectory names separated with right angle brackets, followed by the file name itself, as in
[Indigo]<Cedar®>Documentation>BriefingBlurb.press.
In Cedar, a simple slash may be used instead of the various flavors of brackets, as in
/Indigo/Cedar®/Documentation/BriefingBlurb.press.

PD files: A Printer Dependent print file format. The format and semantics of PD files are simpler than those of Press files. Software exists to turn InterPress masters into PD files, and also to print PD files on various marking engines, including Lilac, Stinger, and the Platemaker.

Peanut: A mail program in Cedar that fetches your messages into a structured Tioga document, rather than storing them in the Cypress database as does Walnut.

Penguin: Generic name for a type of 384 bpi laser-scan printer built on the Xerox 5400 xerographic engine, and connected to an Alto by means of an Orbit interface. Penguins have better solid-area development than Dovers, and can also print two-sided. They are normally driven with Spruce.

Phylum: An IFS in PARC.

physical volume: The name for a disk pack in Pilot.

PIE: Acronym for Personal Information Environment. Implemented in Smalltalk, PIE uses a description language to support the interactive development of programs, and to support the office-related tasks of document preparation, electronic mail, and database management.

Pilot: An operating system that runs on D-machines, and was produced in SDD for use by Star and future products. Using Pilot instead of the Alto OS gives you the advantages of multiprocessing and virtual memory.

pixel: A contraction of the phrase ``picture element'', referred to the tiny, usually square cells out of which a raster image is built up.

plaid screen: Occurs when certain kinds of memory smashes overwrite the display bitmap area or control blocks. The term "salt & pepper" refers to a different pattern of similar origin.

Platemaker: Another name for the MIG.

PolyCedar: A name for the polymorphic language in the Algolic tradition that is the subject of the religious material in the CLRM.

Poplar: An interactive programming language system implemented in Mesa, an experimental system in the direction of programming by relatively inexperienced users. Useful for text manipulation applications.

Poseidon: A Tool that provides the functionality of Neptune in the Tajo environment.

Press: A file format used to encode documents to be transmitted to a printer. Files in this format are conventionally given the file extension .press. Also, a print server program, written in BCPL, that can print curves and raster images as well as characters and rules.

PressEdit: A subsystem that recombines Press files on a page-by-page basis; it can also merge illustrations into documents, although requesting this is a somewhat arcane and delicate operation.

primary selection: A chunk of text that has been distinguished, usually by mouse clicks, as an argument to a future editing operation. The current primary selection is indicated in Tioga by a solid underline, or by video reversal.

PrincOps: The Xerox Mesa Processor Principles of Operation, essentially a description of a particular abstract machine. D-machines implement the PrincOps architecture by means of hardware and microcode, and Pilot was constructed to run on PrincOps machines.

print server: A computer that provides printing services, usually for files formatted in a particular way. The term also refers to the software that converts such files into a representation that can be processed by a specific printer hardware interface. Spruce and Press are examples of print server programs that accept the .press print file format.

proc: (or PROC:) An abbreviated form of the common and important word ``procedure''.

products: The following is a list of the most commonly encountered Xerox product numbers and their distinguishing characteristics:

PSD: Acronym for Printing Systems Division, a part of Xerox.

public interface: An interface that offers to provide services to all comers. Private interfaces, in contrast, specify the services that various modules in a single program will supply to each other.

Puffin: Generic name for a type of 384 bpi laser-scan color printer built on the Xerox 6500 xerographic engine, and normally driven by Press.

PUP: Acronym for PARC Universal Packet. The structure used to transmit blocks of information (packets) on the Ethernet. Also, one such unit of information: a datagram. Bob Metcalfe once remarked that this name was chosen since all prior PARC communication protocols were ``real dogs''. See the blue-and-white report entitled ``Pup: An Internetwork Architecture'', number CSL-79-10.

Quake: A Dover on the first floor of Building 35.

Quantum: Brand name of certain disk drives.

R-name: A complete name from Grapevine's point of view: R-names have two parts, a prefix and a registry, separated by a dot as in ``Anderson.PA''. R-names that designate distribution lists have prefixes that end in an up-arrow, as in ``CSL^.PA''.

Raven: A 300 bpi laser-scan printer based on the 8044, with good solid-area development. Upgraded in the imaging group to 384 bpi and used as a Press printer.

registry: A concept used by Grapevine to partition the space of names. ``PA'' and ``WBST'' are examples of registries.

release: A consistent set of versions of all of the files in a large software system. Cedar releases occur whenever major enhancements in functionality become available or when sufficiently numerous or important errors (see show-stopper) have been corrected.

release master: The person in charge of coordinating a Cedar release, with the help of special software (the ReleaseTool) based on DF files.

religious: Used locally to refer to a debate about which people have strong feelings, but for which there is no easy technical resolution; when discussing religious issues, positions are advanced based on belief rather than on understanding. For example, the question of whether or not windows in a user interface should be allowed to overlap and partially obscure each other, as pieces of paper do in the real world, is often the subject of religious debate. More experience in user interface design, or sufficient advances in the cognitive psychology of user interfaces, may someday make this question less religious.

Rem.cm: A file used by the Alto Executive to store commands to be interpreted after the current one has completed. See Com.cm.

Research Internet: The original Xerox Internet using primarily PUP protocols designed by folks in CSL.

Reticle Generator: A version of the MIG that prints directly on masks for integrated circuits.

reverse engineering: Designing something by taking measurements from an existing sample that someone else designed.

Rigging: A component of Cedar that implements the various flavors of strings, including Ropes.

RockNRoll: (or RockAndRoll:) A Raven printer in CSL.

Rockhopper: A Penguin in the Bayhill building.

RollBack: The way to return to a clean Cedar world saved by a checkpoint.

Rope: An immutable string of characters (a rope is a ``thick'' string). Ropes are the standard way to pass strings around within Cedar; other types of strings, including REF TEXT and REF READONLY TEXT, are available for places where performance is a big issue.

RPC: Acronym for Remote Procedure Call, a technique for calling a procedure from one machine to be executed in another machine over a network. Also, a package of software supporting Remote Procedure Calls within Cedar. RPC is the standard way for Cedar programs to communicate over the network: Tank, Football, Alpine, and Etherphones all communicate by means of RPC. For more details about the concept of RPC, as well as fascinating references to life in the South Pacific, read Bruce Nelson's thesis, which is available as the blue-and-white number CSL-81-9.

rubble of bits: An unintelligible Cedar world arising from violations of safe storage invariants.

rule: A printing term describing a rectangle whose sides are parallel to the coordinate axes; usually thin enough in one dimension or the other to be thought of as a (horizontal or vertical) line.

safe storage: Garbage-collected, dynamically-allocated, strongly-typed storage in Cedar.

Scavenger.boot: An Alto program available through the NetExec that checks for damaged file structures in a BFS and tries to repair them.

SCL: Acronym for System Concepts Laboratory, a part of PARC. Formerly known as the Software Concepts Group. Notably, the builders of Smalltalk.

scroll: Refers to a method of repositioning text on a display as though as though one were moving a window over a long, continuous sheet of paper.

scroll bar: A bar, usually located along the left edge of a window, with the property that clicking in this bar causes scrolling (or perhaps thumbing) to happen.

SDD: Acronym for System Development Division; the technical (as opposed to marketing) portion of OSD.

secondary selection: A chunk of text distinguished, usually by mouse clicks, as the second argument to a future editing operation. The current secondary selection is indicated in Tioga by a gray underline, or by a gray background.

Semillon: A Grapevine server in Building 35.

server: A computer dedicated to performing some collection of service functions for the communal good (e.g., a print server, boot server, or file server).

seven-wire interface: Yes, Virginia, hardware people use the concept of interface as well as software folk. The seven-wire interface describes how the microprocessor located in the terminal of a D-machine (in the base of the CRT, to be specific) communicates with the parent computer.

show-stopper: A bug serious enough to prevent further progress.

Shugart: A manufacturer of disk drives.

signal: A mechanism for handling exceptional conditions that arise in Mesa or Cedar programs. See catch phrase.

SIL: Acronym for Simple ILlustrator. An illustrator program used for logic design and drawing in general. A weird but efficient user interface; solid performance.

SIS: Acronym for Scientific Information Systems; the name of that part of EOS that is still a part of Xerox.

SLOT: Acronym for Scanning Laser Output Transducer.

Smalltalk: An integrated programming system based on object-oriented style and message passing, invented and developed by SCL. Described in great detail in a recently issued book(!).

solid-area development: The ability of a printer to produce large areas of black. Requests for large black areas on printers like Dovers, which don't have this ability, will result in a fringe of dark gray around a sea of light gray.

SophtSpheroid: A small, round, white object usually found on diamonds. Consider joining a Xerox softball team for more information on this indelicate topic.

Spruce: A program that takes Press files consisting of text and rules, converts them to a form acceptable by an Orbit interface, and prints them. A print server.

Spy: A program to investigate another program's performance when running in Cedar.

Squirrel: A personal database program based on the Cypress database in Cedar.

Star: An OIS product of Xerox, developed within SDD. Also referred to by various product numbers in the 8000's. The primary professional workstation of Star is the 8010. The 8000 architecture was created in CSL.

Stinger: A Raven located in the imaging group, running Press.

STP: The Pilot interface to the FTP file transfer protocol.

style: A collection of little programs in a language very like JaM that define the meanings of the various looks and formats of the text in a formatted Tioga document. Different style rules exist for how things should look on the screen and for how they should look when printed on paper (implemented by the TSetter).

subdirectory: File directories on an IFS can be divided into a hierarchical collection of subdirectories. The subdirectory names are listed from the root of the tree down to the leaves, and are separated by the single character ``>'' (see path name).

subsystem: A program running under a specific operating system. Normally used to refer to Alto programs that run under the Alto OS, but also used to refer to PDP-10 programs that run under TENEX.

Swat: A debugger used primarily for BCPL programs. Also, the key used in conjunction with the ``control'' or ``shift'' keys to invoke this debugger, as well as various other debuggers. The Swat key is the lowest of the three unmarked keys at the right edge of the keyboard. Used as a verb to refer to the act of striking these keys or entering the debugger.

Swatee: A file used by debugging programs (both Swat and the Alto/Mesa debugger) to hold the core image of the program being debugged. Also used as a scratch file by many Alto subsystems. Not to be deleted under any circumstances.

Sys.boot: An Alto disk file containing the executable representation of the Alto Operating System.

SysDir: The Alto file directory. Roughly speaking, this file contains the mapping from file names to starting disk locations.

SysFont.al: An Alto screen font used by the Executive and (generally) as a default by other programs. The safest way to change your SysFont is with the Delete.~ and Copy.~ commands of the Alto Executive. Simply FTP'ing a new font on top of SysFont will cause exotic behavior during the CounterJunta when FTP is finished.

system models: A part of the Cedar project aimed at giving programmers help in describing the structure of large systems: getting consistent versions of files, replacing single modules within a running system, and recompiling and rebinding just what has been changed, all in the right order.

Tajo: The user interface portion of the Mesa Development Environment. Each facility in the Tajo environment is called a Tool, and Tajo itself is sometimes called the Tools Environment.

Tank: An n-player video arcade game in Cedar. Get a tank game going and then close the tank viewer and check out the wonderful icon that results.

teledebug: Debugging one machine from another other the Internet. The prefix ``tele-'' is used in general for doing things remotely.

Telnet: A PUP-based protocol used to establish full-duplex, teletype-like communication with a remote computer. (The term is borrowed from a similar protocol used on the ARPANET.) Chat speaks this protocol.

Tenex: An operating system for the DEC PDP-10 computer, which also ran on MAXC.

TEX: A document compiler written by Don Knuth at Stanford; the only current implementation of TEX at PARC runs in Cedar. TEX can handle mathematical formulas, but doesn't let you see anything like what you get.

Thyme: An electrical-level circuit simulator, used for evaluating the correctness and performance of small pieces of the designs of integrated circuits.

thumbing: A technique of positioning a file (usually text) to an arbitrary position for viewing on a display. The name is intended to suggest the ``thumb-index'' with which some dictionaries are equipped, which performs somewhat the same function: gets you to roughly the right place quickly.

TIC: Acronym for Technical Information Center; the fancy name for what is more generally known as the PARC library.

Tioga: The document editor in Cedar, which was built by folk in the imaging group. Tioga formatting uses the concepts of level, node, look, format, and style; for more details, read TiogaDoc.tioga. Documents formatted with Tioga can be printed with the TSetter.

TiogaDoc.tioga: Documentation for the Tioga editor. The official home of this file is [Indigo]<Cedar®>Documentation>.

TIP: A system for interpreting keyboard and mouse actions and turning them into sequences of commands. You may customize your Tioga user interface by layering your own TIP table on top of the standard Tioga TIP table.

Tool: A facility available in the Tajo environment, or the program that makes that facility available. For example, one speaks of the ``File Tool'', which can perform file transfers for you.

Tools Environment: Former name for Tajo.

transaction: A collection of reads and writes of shared data that is guaranteed to be atomic: either all of the writes happen (the transaction commits) or none of them do (it aborts). Furthermore, the reads will see consistent data in that either all of the writes made by some other transaction will be visible, or none of them will.

Trident: The brand name of a type of disk drive that is quite common around here. There are T-80's (that is, 80MByte Trident drives) and T-300's. Tridents are manufactured by Century Data Systems, a subsidiary of Xerox.

TSetter: The typesetting program for Tioga documents; converts foo.tioga into foo.press, and optionally sends the latter to your favorite print server.

typeahead: An ability to type characters to a program before that program has asked for them. Useful for wizards; essential when using slow machines. See also mouse-ahead.

typescript: A file used to back-up information (usually text) appearing in a region of the display.

Twinkle: A Gateway in Building 35 of PARC.

uncaught signal: An exceptional condition (perhaps an error indication) that no current program other than the Mesa or Cedar debugger has expressed a willingness to deal with. The debugger is willing to deal with anything, of course: it deals with these exceptional events by halting the offending process and then informing the user. In the language of the CLRM, an uncaught signal should be thought of as an invocation of a dynamically bound procedure that turns out not to have been bound at all; see catch phrase.

user: A person (rather than a program) who avails herself of the services of some program or system. At the moment, the author is a user of Tioga. See client.

user.cm: A file in the Alto world containing a number of logically distinct sections that each define certain configuration parameters (e.g., the location of a preferred print server for a particular file format). Programs that interpret such parameters are often organized to read user.cm only at installation time (e.g., Bravo).

VAXC: (or PARCVAX:) A Vax 11/785 running Unix 4.2 BSD providing remote login (Telnet) and file transfer (FTP) to other Arpanet machines.

viewer: The name for a window in the Viewers window package.

ViewerDoc.tioga: Documentation for the Viewers window package. You might try looking for this file on the directory [Indigo]<Cedar®>Documentation>.

Viewers: A screen management and window package for Cedar providing buttons, menus, and windows.

ViewRec: A software package in Cedar that produces convenient user interfaces to fairly arbitrary programs automatically.

Viking: A Dover on the first floor of Building 35.

VLSI: Acronym for Very Large Scale Integration of electronic circuits on chips.

VM: Acronym for Virtual Memory.

Voice: A small but mighty project in CSL to tame the telephone and otherwise make full use of voice communications in our personal information systems. The Voice Project recently produced the Etherphone. See the blue-and-white report titled ``Adding Voice to an Office Computer Network'', number CSL-83-8.

Walnut: A mail system for Cedar. Walnut uses the Cypress database to store and organize messages, and it calls upon Grapevine to transport them.

Watch: A Cedar performance monitoring tool displaying computing activity.

WaterLily: A Mesa program that does source compares: compares two text files and reports the differences. Available in Alto/Mesa, Tajo, and Cedar.

wedged: Describes the state of a program when there is no response to input from either the keyboard or the mouse. May affect the whole system (my system is wedged) or just some part thereof.

whiteboards: A package in Cedar for arranging and accessing information graphically.

Winchester: Originally, this was the name of a project within IBM. But the name leaked out, and it is now used industry-wide to refer to a particular rigid disk technology. In a Winchester disk drive, the heads and platters come all hermetically sealed; that is, Winchester drives do not use removable disk packs.

window: A display region, usually rectangular, used to view (a portion of) an image that generally exceeds the bounds of the region.

wizard: One who knows a programming system inside and out.

Wonder: A Dover on the third floor of Building 35.

world-swap: The process of writing out the complete state of a machine's processes and memory onto a disk file, and of swapping in a different state. Some debuggers work by means of world-swaps, which swap between the debugger and the program being debugged. Note that, the more memory you have, the slower a world-swap will be.

Xerox Development Environment: (or XDE:) See the Mesa Development Environment.

XGP: (archaic) Acronym for Xerox Graphics Printer. An obsolete, CRT scanned, 200 bpi, continuous paper, xerographic printer.

XM: Acronym for Extended Memory: an option on Alto II's that allows the memory size to be increased from one to four banks.

XNS: (or simply NS:) An acronym for Xerox Network Services: the protocols for using the Ethernet in the Star world. NS packets are analogous to PUP's, and the NS protocols include analogs to such higher-level protocols as FTP.

Yoda: A Dover in Building 35.

Zinfandel: An Alto mail server that is part of the Grapevine distributed transport mechanism.