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Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
And something like Gopher.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
Considering most of the Internet was developed under UNIX machines, the alternate universe would be almost unrecognizable, for good or bad.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
Or maybe another thing like UNIX would've replaced Lisp Machines quickly.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
It is too complex for novices, with too many keys. And not optimal to the initiated, as key combinations are much more efficient.
anyone with the slightest ergonomic knowledge cringe just by glancing at those things.
that keyboard, along with the space cadet one, is an aberration. It is too complex for novices, with too many keys. And not optimal to the initiated, as key combinations are much more efficient. anyone with the slightest ergonomic knowledge cringe just by glancing at those things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering most of the Internet was developed under UNIX machines, the alternate universe would be almost unrecognizable, for good or bad.
That is wrong. Most of what the Internet is was already in place at Xerox PARC labs.
In the fullness of time, long after 1963, 18 bits of 36 bit words totaling 1 MiB of 9 bit bytes was crippling, but that much memory was at the time unimaginable. MIT's proposal some time later to have a full address space of memory built was a big thing, some said it couldn't be done.
Which gets into one big difference between Xerox PARC Altos and their software and UNIX(TM) for the first decade or so: they were seriously constrained by memory. Altos were 16 bit machines, also word addressed, so a total of 128 KiB, although they had a bank switching feature. The bigger PDP-11s had a split Instruction and Data (I&D) feature so that a program could have 64 KiB of code, and due to the MMU, 58 KiB of data and 8 KiB of stack, also for a total of 128 KiB, although you could get fancy with overlays as BSD 2.x did to support TCP/IP.
I believe this resulted in significant differences in software and system design, e.g. part of MIT's going for The Right Thing was using systems with large (for the time) address spaces. Whereas the smaller systems PARC and UNIX systems required more compromises, although occasionally that had good results, e.g. UNIX pipelines and the conventions that developed from them.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
Considering most of the Internet was developed under UNIX machines, the alternate universe would be almost unrecognizable, for good or bad.
A more interesting alternate history for me would be if the folks doing system research had settled on a functional language like Haskell rather than a procedural one like C, what would our APIs look like today. I say that because I suspect that using C as a the language of choice was more influential than the OS of choice.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
Site's down, here's a pastebin of the text: http://pastebin.com/6kkCTgjg Neither archive.org nor Google Cache have this. Weird. Video from article: http://vimeo.com/83886950 Image 1: http://i.imgur.com/r62FSfE.jpg Image 2: http://i.imgur.com/xsxutc3.png Image 3: http://i.imgur.com/zL9DFbr.png
The things that stood out to me were that a) boy, it was a slow system. Sure vi etc are more spartan, but even back then I'd imagine the were significantly faster than this Lisp machine. b) mouse was clearly the hot new thing, it is used lot more than what I think would be optimal.