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Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar

Name: Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar
Uploaded: 2019-04-17T22:43:32Z
Duration: 1 h 56 min 7 s
Channel: Computer History Museum
Description: Eric Bier demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language developed at Xerox PARC.

Computer History Museum

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A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
Presented by Eric Bier, PARC research scientist

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

7.5K views7 years ago3 recommendations

History and culture Systems programming History of computing Operating systems Vim, Emacs and editors

Eric Bier demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language developed at Xerox PARC.

[Recorded on January 24, 2019] This interpretive production was created from archival footage of Eric Bier, PARC research scientist, demonstrating the Cedar integrated environment and programming language on January 24, 2019. Cedar was an evolution of the Mesa environment/language, developed at PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory originally for the Xerox Alto. Mesa was modular and strongly-typed, and influenced the later Modula family of languages. Cedar/Mesa ran on the D-machine successors to the Alto (such as the Dorado) and added features including garbage collection, and was later ported to Sun workstations. Cedar/Mesa’s integrated environment featured a graphical window system and a text editor, Tioga, which could be used for both programming and document preparation, allowing for fonts, styles, and graphics to be embedded in code files. The editor and all its commands were also available everywhere, including on the command console and in text fields. The demo itself is running through a Mac laptop remotely logged into Bier’s Sun workstation at PARC using X Windows. Bier demonstrates the Cedar development environment, Tioga editor, editing commands using three mouse buttons, sophisticated text search features, the command line, and the Gargoyle graphics editor, which was developed as part of Bier’s UC Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation. Bier is joined by Nick Briggs, Chris Jacobi, and Paul McJones. Catalog number:102781041 Lot number: X8888.2019

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers recommend this to see the advanced capabilities of Xerox PARC's historical Cedar and Tioga systems.

pjmlpon Hacker News • 6 years agoRecommends

On “Re-Thinking the Desktop OS”

Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link to this video Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.