251–260 of 316 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but try and figure out how you'd do better... efficient.ly. Over the network...
As it turns out, the web eventually came around to using NeWS's extensible client/server architecture, once they rediscovered it 20 years later and called it "Ajax". (2005 [1] - 1985 [2] = 20) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)#History [2] http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The contemporary windowing system NeWS is worth a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS Its architecture was more similar to modern web apps, with the UI running code and processing events on the client machine.
Less important and less popular there was also MGR, which treated windowing more like a terminal session, and so was more Unix-philosophy than most. It was neat, and because of its smaller profile it got ported to a lot of systems (Atari ST, etc.) that struggled under the full X11 system http://www.hack.org/mc/mgr/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha! I switched to Mac so I could have pipes, grep and bash. I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence has to do with the switch to UNIX. I was on Windows using Cygwin for years before anyone I knew was using a Mac. Then OSX came out, and all of a sudden all the academics I knew switched to Mac, and a couple years later most of the professional programmers I knew had switched. The great thing about a Ma…
> The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts. Luckily, that is basically true for modern Linux as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you would have wanted a comparable Lisp experience on a SUN workstation (large bitmap screen, large disk, software, ...) the actual price difference wasn't that much. But there were a lot of underpowered and slow SUNS, which were cheaper. But then you would better not use Allegro CL, Lucid CL or LispWorks on those. 16 or even 24 MB RAM were simply not enough and GC was fighting with the virtual memory pager... The…
True, but the point is that there weren't any really cheap LispMs until it was too late to matter. Besides which, a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market.
What was also expensive was the software. I got a KEE license on a used machine I was given. I think it cost $50k. Similar Symbolics extensions for their OS could be extremely expensive. The graphics suite did cost several 10k per module (paint, model, render, tools, ...).
> a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market
Well, they could not live from developers alone. They were also looking for end users. Some of the machines were thought as delivery machines, cheaper and with less resources. There were also tools like 'firewall', which were supposed to keep users from getting in contact with the development environment (like debugger, ...).
Actually Symbolics also targeted high-end endusers, both with hardware and with software. They had to go beyond government developers - to be able to sell machines/software. There were applications that were kind of development centric, like the iCAD cad system - where one could program 3d models via Flavors extensions. But one huge area for Symbolics was the graphics market. 2d, 2.5d animation, 3d animation, paint/model/render. Much of that was used without programming. The graphics suite was mostly targeted at graphics professionals, often doing 3d visualizations for TV, cinema and games. Many TV stations had their logos animated on Symbolics machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4HXPJtym2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4HXPJtym2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Lo0IfUSPk
Early:
http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html
Later high-end hardware/software for accelerated graphics: http://lispm.de/symbolics-1/symbolics-1.html
Thus the UI had to be usable for non-programmers doing graphics work.
Any thoughts on UNIX security? I've been wondering what the most secure OS is for a long time, and the answer seems to be "systems that stopped being developed before you were born."
If you're not aware of it already, have a look at these links as starting points. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evalua... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-evaluated_operating_s... A lot of the lower-level criteria require features present in operating systems we all use from day to day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you would have wanted a comparable Lisp experience on a SUN workstation (large bitmap screen, large disk, software, ...) the actual price difference wasn't that much. But there were a lot of underpowered and slow SUNS, which were cheaper. But then you would better not use Allegro CL, Lucid CL or LispWorks on those. 16 or even 24 MB RAM were simply not enough and GC was fighting with the virtual memory pager... The…
True, but the point is that there weren't any really cheap LispMs until it was too late to matter. Besides which, a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market.
This very book was brought up yesterday in a post critical of the unix philosophy. If you scroll down a bit, or do a search for Analemma_ you might find some useful info. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777077
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As it turns out, the web eventually came around to using NeWS's extensible client/server architecture, once they rediscovered it 20 years later and called it "Ajax". (2005 [1] - 1985 [2] = 20) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)#History [2] http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...
Ha! Yello, Don. Howzit?
Any thoughts on UNIX security? I've been wondering what the most secure OS is for a long time, and the answer seems to be "systems that stopped being developed before you were born."
re UNIX security It was proven impossible to fully secure by high-assurance engineers back when INFOSEC was being invented. UNIX was much smaller back then. Project such as UCLA Secure UNIX and products such as Trusted Xenix were still unable to reach high assurance due to problems baked into the architecture and UNIX principles themselves. Even with API changes, they still had problems with covert channels. That led…