The Mesa Group at Xerox

Dan Conde	Charles Haynes	Brian Yamamoto	Phil Karlton	Dana Gleason
David Elliott	Becky Saaranzin Fontes	Andy Daniels	Dick Sweet	Sherrie Collins
Loretta Guarino	John Wick	Richard Johnsson	Brad Davirro	Shannon McElyea

Feb 29, 1984

I had the good fortune to work with Phil for several years at Xerox. My favorite story starts when Xerox management was asked why there wasn't a spreadsheet for the Star product. The answer was that the Dandelion was not a suitable processor for such computation. Phil and I (with Richard and John's blessing, giving us no other assignments for a few weeks) set out to prove them wrong. We took a copy of VisiCalc, running on the Xerox CPM machine, and produced a spreadsheet with exactly the same look and feel running on Tajo (not a simple feat, since the user interface paradigms were significantly different between the two machines). We were particularly proud that our 13 significant digit decimal arithmetic package actually ran faster than the 32 bit IEEE floating point implementation on the machine. We were somewhat chagrined when management decided to ship our code with the product without giving it a mouse based interface. On the plus side, we were each given $300 to spend on our fellow employees as an award for writing the spreadsheet. In his characteristic style, Phil opted for buying $300 worth of M&M's for the building. They lasted for several weeks. My money went toward a theater style popcorn popper that was still running several years after I left SDD.

-- Dick Sweet

Note: Mesa was the name given to the language and processor architecture used in building the Xerox Star products. The Mesa group was responsible for the compiler and programming tools, programming environment (window interface, utilities, etc.) and the microcoded instruction set of the processor.