Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
patrickdomanico.com
Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
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Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#2If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS:
https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html
As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolute best talent in the entire country, and unified them towards a goal of pure exploratory research with no market pressure, with all the excesses of 1980s Japan.
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#3Getting "too many requests" at the moment.
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#4Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote:
"If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan:
- enter a market
- become a monopoly
- use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality"
A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising.
0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#5[dead]
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#6[flagged]
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#7A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#8Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote: "If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan: - enter a market - become a monopoly - use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality" A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. 0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysuth…
> use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality
But why would a corporation do that when it could simply distribute those profits to shareholders?
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#9I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine, ran InterLisp-D on it for about two years, then slowed it down by installing Common Lisp on it.
Wonderful for Larry et.,al. to keep it going as open source.
Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
#10Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote: "If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan: - enter a market - become a monopoly - use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality" A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. 0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysuth…
> use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality But why would a corporation do that when it could simply distribute those profits to shareholders?
Unless mandated, why would the people controlling a corporation (and its budget) do that? While the corp has money in the bank, it's kinda their money, in the sense that they decide what to spend it on. If distributed back to the shareholders, the money evaporates from their perspective, so there's not much incentive to do it unless it's required, or unless they will benefit by it (e.g., they have a lot of stock themselves and would like the dividend).