Out of curiosity, what were things that these systems did poorly or that we know not to do these days?
Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
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Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#22Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
Well, the 8-bits, Lisa, Macintosh, and Windows would have still been with us. So, I guess AT&T Sys V and BSD would have not happened which gets rid of Sun and makes one wonder what Dr. Tanenbaum and Mr. Torvalds would have worked on. I guess the second vector would have been what Steve Jobs would have built after leaving Apple (NeXTSTEP, the ultimate user friendly LISP machine?!?). Maybe Dylan would have worked in its infix form.
I would imagine that intelligent people would have worked at getting the same problems solved in a different form.
[edit] Instruction Sets from Intel, IBM, MIPS, Motorola would have been really different. Personally, I wanted the Forth machines to rule :)
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering most of the Internet was developed under UNIX machines, the alternate universe would be almost unrecognizable, for good or bad.
It is a bit more nuanced than that, ARPANet was a lot of DEC machines, USC and USC-ISI had a number of DEC-10's on the network. Usenet was however primarily a bunch of UNIX (or UNIX like) machines. They traded in their modems for nifty connections to the Internet and carried a lot of the same protocols with them. Much of the Internet protocols were developed in college labs with the ability to 'plug in' different UNI…
Lisp Machines were usually networked machines. Their were two branches:
* Interlisp-D from Xerox were smaller machines, networkd with a server + printer. PARC developed networked collaborative software for them, the first remote GUI was written for Interlisp, the first IMAP client was written for Interlisp-D, ...
* the MIT Lisp Machines were developed with CHAOS, an Ethernet-based protocol. TCP/IP was available early. Many of the TCP/IP protocols were implemented for them (often client and server): chat, terminal, mail, RPC, NFS, X11, DNS, HTTP, remote printing, remote booting, ... They also ran DECNET and some IBM network protocol. Actually the networking code from Symbolics was quite sophisticated in some respects...
BBN (the Internet company at that time) also used a lot of Lisp Machines. They had some distributed remote object networking substrate, which also ran on Lisp Machines.
Lucent had developed an ATM network switch, which first versions were based on multiple embedded Lisp Machine boards for the switching code and another Lisp Machine for the control and administration. They ran all kind of fancy networking code on them in a zero downtime fashion with live software upgrades. They were for example thought as large network and telephony switches.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#24Site'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
> Video from article: http://vimeo.com/83886950 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.
That was a 5 MIPS machine with just 40 megabyte RAM. The UI ran over a 10 Mbit/sec Ethernet X11 connection on a remote machine.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering most of the Internet was developed under UNIX machines, the alternate universe would be almost unrecognizable, for good or bad.
It is a bit more nuanced than that, ARPANet was a lot of DEC machines, USC and USC-ISI had a number of DEC-10's on the network. Usenet was however primarily a bunch of UNIX (or UNIX like) machines. They traded in their modems for nifty connections to the Internet and carried a lot of the same protocols with them. Much of the Internet protocols were developed in college labs with the ability to 'plug in' different UNI…
> Lisp systems were popular for research, but were not used extensively for networking research. I expect it was in part a compatibility issue with BSD's socket stuff
They were not used for networking research, AFAIK, but Lisp Machines were definitely very well networked, speaking many protocols which soon came to include IP and TCP (though they started out with MIT's CHAOSnet). I was using Lisp Machines (both Symbolics and TI) networked with Sun 3s in the mid-to-late 1980s, and they definitely interoperated.
But I think that was a few years later than the networking research you're referring to, that created the Internet protocols.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#26I've managed today to boot OpenGenera in a Linux VM. It took me a couple of weeks but it finally works. I intend to have a look myself at what the fuss is all about.
If you're interested, here are some pointers to relevant resources (snap4.tar.gz image works as advertised):
http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html
http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux
http://libarynth.org/vlm_on_linux
The opengenera tar-ball can be found in the intertubes.
Tip: Use Ubuntu 7.04 x86-64 to save you some trouble. I don't know what is the most recent distro that works but 10.10 doesn't. You get a blank window because recent X servers are missing something. Before proceeding with the installation, complete the Ubuntu image with relevant archive server URLs to be able to apt-get with ease.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#27Out of curiosity, what were things that these systems did poorly or that we know not to do these days?
Costing $70,000 for the base machine would be one thing.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#28Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#29Out of curiosity, what were things that these systems did poorly or that we know not to do these days?
Security was literally nonexistent. If you were at the console, you had control of the machine. Pwning one over the network was probably not difficult, though it wasn't the kind of thing people spent much time on back then.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#30I own a Symbolics Lisp Machine (a MacIvory). I'm in San Francisco and would be happy to show it to anybody who's interested and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Be warned, I'm still learning how to use Genera, so we'd be learning how to use the system together.