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Inter-Office Memorandum
To Dorado Users Date September 19, 1979
From Gene McDaniel Location Palo Alto
Subject How to Operate Dorados Organization CSL
XEROX
Filed on: [Ivy] This document describes the procedures naive programmers may follow to operate the Dorado.
There are four sections:
Power On/Off and Booting p.2
turning the power on
turning the power otT
booting
Simulated Alto Disk p.3
how it works
when your files aren't there
changing disk packs
initializing a new Alto disk
Loading Your Emulator p.4
invoking midas
aborting the Dorado's execution
loading and running your emulator
Elementary checkout. p.5
midas is still executing
midas is not executing
Logging Errors p.6
Once you get started, the Dorado behaves like a big, fast Alto. Getting started requires booting the
emulator (Mesa, Lisp, or Smalltalk) of your choice. The section, Loading Your Emulator, discusses
what you need to know to force the Dorado to run the language of your choice. The section,
Simulated Alto Disk, discusses the way the Trident disk is formatted to look like a collection of
"double Model 44" disks.
Here are some terms you need to know:
Emulator refers to the microcode that implements some language. The Dorado has Alto, Mesa,
Lisp, and Smalltalk emulators. Due to current software limitations, users may have to manually
change the microcode in the Dorado. The Mesa, Lisp, and Smalltalk emulators include support for
Alto emulation as well their "target" language. For example, the Smalltalk emulator will run the
Alto executive.
Midas is an Alto program that can control Dorados when it executes on an Alto with the right
"umbilical" connections to a Dorado. We use Midas for hardware and microcode debugging. For
the present time, users who want to use Mesa, Lisp or Smalltalk may have to use Midas to load the
Dorado with the appropriate emulator.
Baseboard refers to part of the Dorado hardware that actually contains a microcomputer of its own.
This microcomputer can boot the Dorado and even reload the microcode, using an emulator stored
in the microcomputer's memory. That memory is small and there is room for an Alto emulator only.
Dorado User Operations 2
Power On/Off and Booting
Turning the POWER ON. If the power is off, turn on the power switch in the lower left hand
corner in the front of the Dorado. After about 45 seconds, the Dorado will boot the Alto executive.
If power switch is on and the display is dark, the baseboard has "turned off' the Dorado. Push the
boot button on the back of the keyboard to cause the baseboard to turn on the rest of the Dorado's
power, spin up the disk, if there is one loaded, and boot the executive.
Turning the POWER OFF. Push the boot button four times. This causes the baseboard to begin
the power down sequence. When the Dorado display goes blank, all the power execpt for the
baseboard's power is off. Only then should the user turn off all power supplies by turning OFF the
power switch at the lower left corner in the front of the Dorado.
BOOTING. The boot button on the back of the Dorado keyboard performs a superset of Alto-style
boot activities for the user. Single pushes of the boot button work as you expect, more pushes do
something extra! There are three things to remember about this:
If you push the button too fast, the baseboard may loose count and do the wrong thing.
However you can escape from this situation by keeping the button pushed "in" for more
than 2.5 seconds, or
You can escape from this situation by