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Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

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Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#91

Post by rbanffy »

abecedarius wrote: post #17
susam wrote: post #8

The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has…

I have fond memories of Allen's book Anatomy of Lisp . I guess there are only historical reasons to read it now, but at the time it felt like an introduction to wizardry.

Historical reasons for reading are always good. We gain much insight from time travel and, until we invent actual time machines so we can get our IBM 5100's and go ourselves to Woodstock, books are the next best thing.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#92

Post by rbanffy »

hota_mazi wrote: post #87
zozbot234 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advertisements are among the most interesting things about old magazines like BYTE, though. They preserve a snapshot of what the computer industry was like back then. Even the pricing information alone is very valuable.

Oh absolutely! Browsing through these pages today, I find myself reading the ads a lot more than the actual articles, which haven't aged well. But back then... man, these ads were cancer and they made up 80% of the weight and price of the magazine.

Those ads made the magazine possible and accessible. Of course, McGraw Hill made a profit, but BYTE would be a lot more expensive if it were not for the ads.

One interesting point about the ads is that the time it took for a new technology to appear in the ads was usually much shorter than for it to appear in articles. In that sense, the ads were opportunities to peek into the near future (and, in the case of vaporware, alternate timelines).

I like the way magazines like BYTE are preserved and I hope we preserve our current tech as well.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#93

Post by protomyth »

tssva wrote: post #61
sizzzzlerz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Byte, in it's heyday, had the best cover illustrations of any magazine published before or since.

I would put The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell ahead of the Byte cover illustration.

For a certain crowd, I agree. The Saturday Evening Post covers spawned a homage set of covers with DC superheroes and villains that is very true to the original's spirit. I will say that in my youth the Byte covers were "better" because I didn't grow in a place that the SEP covers would invoke feelings of nostalgia or familiarity.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#94

Post by MonkeyClub »

ylee wrote: post #34
susam wrote: post #13

The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). On page 20, it says, "LOGO is, up to surface structure, more or less equivalent to LISP." It further says, "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint ) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world." And…

>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). Hacker News discussion of BYTE 's special Logo issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556 > >In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me in…

> I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.

Yep, this was 100% me too.

I "got" recursion through math and induction and a bit of graph paper, and the way it made my mind recurse to infinity made me feel ... funny ... in that age.

But it wasn't until I used Logo on the school's only Macintosh LC475 that I got the full psychedelic effects.

Nothing as intricate as NetLogo (e.g. see its Koch curve here: http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu...), but still a strong impression.

Funnily, that had as a consequence to fall in love with iterative function systems and pizzabox-form desktops, leading to me being introduced to Matila Ghyka's book, and Sun's Sparcstation 5.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#95

Post by sbf501 »

hota_mazi wrote: post #75
sbf501 wrote: post #67

266 pages of well-written, edited, fact-checked electronics and computer programming. Monthly. Let that sink in. There is so much good info packed into this one issue, it is worth terabytes of crap on stack overflow. Clearly there was less information back then, but it was far higher quality. I'd like to understand how C came to dominate the world when LISP could replace all of the scripting languages we used today.…

To be fair, out of these 256 pages, 200 are really just ads. Your point still stands, but the actual substance is a lot smaller than you describe.

Counterpoint taken.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#96

Post by euroderf »

BeetleB wrote: post #54
KerrAvon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things I don't miss about the era -- good riddance to floppy disks and hard drive crashes -- but the PC world pre-IBM had so much latent possibility and sometimes just plain weird stuff: http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/IMSAI_pre-history.... > A major advance was announced in a press release dated October 25, 1975 in which the young specialty firm offered a relatively new and promising concept. The…

> good riddance to floppy disks and hard drive crashes When did HD crashes go away? I still suffer through them.

And good riddance to serial ports and parallel printer ports. USB saved approx. fifty bazillion man-hours of hassle.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#97

Post by euroderf »

browningstreet wrote: post #2

I had something like the Northstar Horizon advertised on page 20 of this issue, and I ran ZCPR/3 on it, because it had a hard drive. This is after I graduated from my Osborne 1.

Did Northstar ever find their niche ? They sold "multi-user" DOS systems that were just a collection of single-user partitions - no true multi-user magic.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#98

Post by pjmlp »

musicale wrote: post #52
thweoru23432 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, that might be evidence that there really hasn't been much progress in Systems/PL.

C++ seems to have made some progress in the last few decades. Python improves on BASIC in some ways. Java, JavaScript, Swift, and Rust have memory safety like Lisp, PL/I and Ada did. But I tend to agree - the biggest advances seem to be in hardware: now you can run Unix on an internet-connected watch, voice recognition/translation/automatic transcription on a mobile phone, and real-time ray tracing on a game console.

Most of that progress is catching up with what we already had, as you kind of point out on your memory safety remark.

C++ improvements are related to the bare language itself, in regards to tooling, no one seemed to have cared to go beyond what something like C++ Builder has been doing for the last 30 years (more or less).

Python improves on BASIC, while still missing the compilation story from most BASICs.

Diving into Xerox PARC documentation about Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa XDE and Mesa/Cedar is quite revealing in what we already had 40 years ago, and how long it has taken to bring those ideas back into mainstream.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#99

Post by coreload »

rbanffy wrote: post #91
abecedarius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fond memories of Allen's book Anatomy of Lisp . I guess there are only historical reasons to read it now, but at the time it felt like an introduction to wizardry.

Historical reasons for reading are always good. We gain much insight from time travel and, until we invent actual time machines so we can get our IBM 5100's and go ourselves to Woodstock, books are the next best thing.

I have IBM 5100 nostalgia. I wrote a lot of software for that 40 years ago. Speaking of Lisp Machines, the 5100 was basically an APL machine: BASIC and APL in microcode.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#100

Post by ConceptJunkie »

euroderf wrote: post #96
BeetleB wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> good riddance to floppy disks and hard drive crashes When did HD crashes go away? I still suffer through them.

And good riddance to serial ports and parallel printer ports. USB saved approx. fifty bazillion man-hours of hassle.

But cost about forty bazillion man-hours from people inserting the cables the wrong way.
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