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 Location: GUIs > Xerox > Three Rivers / ICL Perq

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Intran Metaform was probably the biggest application for the Perq. Intran Metaform was a suite of applications that included
  • Form Builder - a graphical application for designing and printing forms.
  • Font Builder - used to customize fonts.
  • Graphics Builder - a drawing program with many advanced features.
These were used in conjunction with laser printers to generate high quality output.

Some companies such as Intran built their systems using the PERQ


The display of the Intran system running on a Perq. These are from a video available over at the Digibarn.

Intran eventually moved their products to the Sun workstation.


Finally, the "Perq 3" was a complete redesign based around the Motorola 68020 CPU.

The system was built by ICL and included:.

  • A 68020 + 68881 CPU.
  • 1 or 2 Megabytes of memory.
  • A SCSI disk interface and hard drive.
  • Landscape Monitor
  • An opto-mechanical mouse
  • ICL keyboard
  • 5.25" floppy disk drive
After this the Perq faded away as it was over taken by competition from Sun, Apple, and others.

Another piece of interesting trivia: James Golsling, the "father of Java" got the original concept for the Java VM from a program he wrote to port some software from a Perq by translating Perq Q-Code to VAX assembler and emulating the hardware.

Conclusion: while the Perq existed mainly on the merits of its hardware, the machine served as a testbed for GUI applications and clearly demonstrated what GUI machines could do.

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