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The lost cause of the Lisp machines

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Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#21

Post by _zagj »

f1shy wrote: post #13
_zagj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)

Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?

I was both Alpha being quasi-open itself, like OpenPOWER today, and like earlier PDP minis had been, whereas VAX had been pretty locked down, and OpenVMS getting POSIX compatibility (admittedly probably more the latter than the former, but DEC was big on branding things "open" at the time, partly because they were losing ground):

https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vmslt05a/vu/alpha_hist...

> Although Alpha was declared an "open architecture" right from the start, there was no consortium to develop it. All R&D actions were handled by DEC itself, and sometimes in cooperation with Mitsubishi. In fact, though the architecture was free de jure, most important hardware designs of it were pretty much closed de facto, and had to be paid-licensed (if possible at all). So, it wasn't that thing helping to promote the architecture. To mention, soon after introduction of EV4, DEC's high management offered to license manufacturing rights to Intel, Motorola, NEC, and Texas Instruments. But all these companies were involved in different projects and were of very little to no interest in EV4, so they refused. Perhaps, the conditions could be also unacceptable, or something else. Mistake #5.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#22

Post by calgoo »

mghackerlady wrote: post #6
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

I'm honestly surprised nobody tried to capitalize on the early 2000s Java hype by making some kind of Java box (there were a few things labeled as a Java OS or a Java workstation but none of these were really a "Java Machine")

In theory you could say that simcards were / (are?) Tiny java on a chip machines.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#23

Post by v9v »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #16
_zagj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)

Yes, but also. OpenGenera was ported to x86 some time ago.

I believe it's even been ported to the M1 a few years ago: https://x.com/gmpalter/status/1361855786603929601

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#25

Post by [deleted] »

rmunn wrote: post #5

Time to dig up a classic story about Tom Knight, who designed the first prototype of the Lisp Machine at MIT in the mid-70's. It's in the form of a classic Zen koan. This copy comes from https://jargondb.org/some_ai_koans but I've seen plenty of variations floating around. A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You c…

[deleted]

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#26

Post by f1shy »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #17
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice.

Without those people lots of history (and hence knowledge) would be lost. I’m happy they are around.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#27

Post by Tor3 »

A lot of this could be said about specialized machines in general. I remember visiting the local university last century where a guy was demonstrating a US-made Word Processor machine they had bought, and around the same time a local company was developing something similar. And they looked very cool indeed. But in both cases I thought.. "eh, won't that be total overkill now when we can see standard word processing software on standard computers already arriving? Even if a normal PC doesn't look that cool?" And, as predicted (and I most certainly couldn't be the only one predicting that), the US company as well as the local one folded. At least the company I worked for got to hire some good people from there when the inevitable happened.

It's hard to find where to draw the line when it comes to specialized hardware, and the line moves forth and back all the time. From personal experience it went from something like "multiple input boards, but handle the real time Very Fast interrupts on the minicomputer". And spend six months shaving off half a millisecond so that it worked (we're in the eighties here). Next step - shift those boards into a dedicated box, let it handle the interrupts and DMA and all that, and just do the data demuxing on the computer. Next step (and I wasn't involved in that): Do all the demuxing in the box, let the computer sit back and just shove all of that to disk. And that's the step which went too far, the box got slow. Next step: Make the box simpler again, do all of the heavy demuxing and assembling on the computer, computers are fast after all..

And so on and so forth.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#28

Post by dehrmann »

mghackerlady wrote: post #6
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

I'm honestly surprised nobody tried to capitalize on the early 2000s Java hype by making some kind of Java box (there were a few things labeled as a Java OS or a Java workstation but none of these were really a "Java Machine")

Coincidentally on the front page, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989650

ARM also used to have opcodes for Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#29

Post by Peteragain »

Okay they're dead, but I think the interesting thing here is the relationship between hardware and the way mathematicians (potentially) think about problem solving. The established practices massively constrain the solutions we find, but I do wonder what a Turing Machine would look like if FPGAs had been around in 1930. FPGAs keep getting used to implement processors, but using one to make a c interpreter and then using it to run a vision library is probably not the best way to use FPGAs to recognise tanks with a drone. Which is, presumably, what a Zala Lancet is doing with it's FPGA.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#30

Post by inejge »

f1shy wrote: post #13
_zagj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)

Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?

> Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?

Networking was the initial impetus, but the phrase came to include programming interfaces, which is why POSIX was considered such a big deal. The idea was to promote interoperability and portability, as oposed to manufacturer-specific islands like those from IBM and DEC.

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