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For Xerox Internal Use Only -- October 16, 1977




ALTO SOFTWARE PACKAGES




Conlpiled on: October 16, 1977




Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, California 94304
For Xerox. Internal Use Only -- October 16, 1977
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This list is a directory of major Alto software packages. The files for these
programs are available on the directory. The doculnentation for these
packages is available on . This document is filed as
P ACKAGES.EARS. Some packages have closely-corresonding subsystems
(e.g., TFS Trident disk software and 'l'FU utility); in this case, the bulk of the
aocumcntation is located with in the Alto Subsystems Manual, and a cross-reference
is included in this document.
The items listed below may be flagged by a single character to indicate where the
documentation may be found:

* documentation for these items is contained within this manual;
** these items are described further in a separate docunlent;
II see the Alto Operating System manual for documentation.
IIALLOC: A boundary-tag storage allocator. Documentation is in the Alto
Operating Systenl 1'Ianual. (Ed McCreight)
*ASIM: A procedure which simulates an Alto microprocessor equipped with a
RAM. (Peter Deutsch)
*BCPLRUNTIME: A replacement for the standard Bcpl runtime (in the OS), in
whihcch nearly all of the operations have been microprogrammed. rrypical
Bcpl programs run 25 to 30 percent faster. (Ed Taft)
IIBFS: The "basic file system" subroutines. These do page-oriented 1/0 to disk
files organized according to standard Alto conventions. Documentation is in
the Alto Operating System Manual. (Butler Lampson)
*BYTEBLT: transfers an arbitrary block of 8-bit bytes from one place in
memory to another. (Ed Taft)
*CMDSCAN: an interactive command scanner and collection of command
interpretation procedures. (Ed Taft)
*CONTEx'r: provides facilities for managing multiple ex.ecution contexts for Dcpl
procedures. (Ed Taft) ,
DCBPRESS: This file provides one subroutine for nlaking a one-page Press file
from an Alto screen bit-map. The calling sequence is: DCBPress("filename",
pDCB, [width, height, left, top]), which writes a file of the given name using
pDCB as a pointer to a display control block.. The last four parameters allow
you to select a portion of the rectangle described by the DCB for printing.
Width is the width (in bits) of the window you wish to see; height is the
height in scan-lines; left is the offset from the left edge of the bit-map; 'top
is the offset from the top of the bit-map. (Bob Sproull)
*DIABLOPRINTER: Routines that implement streams on the Diablo printer. (Ed
Taft)
**DIALOG and DIRECTOR: a set of run-time subroutines for conducting a dialog
between a human and a program, and a mechanism for con trolling the
execution of a 'batch' of programs. Further documentation is on
Dialog.ears. ( J ay Israel)
*DPDIVIDE: Computes the quotient and remainder from the division of one 32-
bit 2's complement number by another. (Petor Deutsch)
UDSTREAM: Provides a capability for display streams, nlultiple fonts, bit
For Xerox Internal Use Only -- October 16, 1977
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repositioning, selective erasing and polarity inversion. Documentation is in
the Alto Operating System f-Ilanual. lPeter Deutsch)
*EFTP package: A Pup-based file-transfer package using a simple (EFTP)
communications protocol. (John Shoch)
*ETHEUBOOT: A subroutine that will "boot" the Alto from one of several boot
files supplied by Ethernet