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The Briefing Blu rb:
E,xploring, the Ethernet with Mouse and Keyboard
1983 Edition
By Lyle Ramshaw of PARC/CSL
An immigration document in the tradition of Roy Levin's A Field Guide to Alto-Land.
June 7, 1983
Filed on: [lndigo]
Abstract: This document is a general introduction to the computing environment at PARC slanted
towards the needs and interests of newcomers to the Computer Science Laboratory. If you are
looking at this document on-line from within the editor named Tioga, you might want to lise the
level-clipping functions to see the overall structure rather than simply plowing straight through.
Click the "Levels" button in the top menu, then click "FirstLeveIOnly" in the new menu that
appears. That will show you the major section headings. Click "MoreLevels" to see the
subsections, or click" AIlLevels" to read the details.
XEROX Xerox Corporation
Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, California 94304
For Internal Use Only
THE BRIEFING BLURB 2
Raison d'Etre
The purpose of this document is to help immigrants adapt to the local computing community. By
"the local community", I mean primarily the Computer Science Lab, the Imaging Sciences Lab, and the
Integrated Design Lab of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, better known by the acronyms CSL,
ISL, and IDL respectively. Immigrants to other computing communities within Xerox may also find this
document of interest, but I make no guarqntees. I shall assume herein that said immigrants know quite
a bit about computer science in general. Hence, I shall concentrate upon discussing the idiosyncratic
characteristics of the local hardware environment, software environment, social environment, linguistic
environment, and the like.
You will doubtless read many documents while you are at Xerox. A common convention observed in many manuals and
memos is that fine points or items of complex technical content peripheral to the main discussion appear in small type, like this
paragraph. You will soon discover that you cannot resist reading this fine print and that, despite its diminutive stature, it draws
your eyes like a magnet. This document has such passages as well, just so that you can begin to enjoy ferreting out the diamonds
hidden in the mountain of coal.
There is a great deal of useful information available on-line at Xerox in the form of documents and
source programs. Reading them is often very helpful, but finding them can be a nuisance. Throughout
this document, references to on-line material are indicated by , where n is a citation number in the
bibliography at the end of this document. Standard citations to the open literature appear as [n].
If you are fortunate enough to be reading this document from within Tioga (the Cedar editor), you
should pause at this point to tryout the "Def' command. If you were to