Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Unknown: you asked about how I display images. The Alto display is memory-mapped, with a complex display-list system where different horizontal stripes can come from different regions of memory. (This makes scrolling fast since you can just update pointers rather than moving pixels.) The in-memory format is just one bit = one pixel. I wrote a short Python script (using the PIL image library) to convert (via dithering) a jpg to a file of raw pixels, and then load this file into the Alto's memory. So now I can easily display arbitrary images like this one. While the Alto is only black and white, Xerox PARC also developed a color system in 1972 called SuperPaint.
Sep 30, 2017, 2:27:46 PM
Posted to Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second