The lost cause of the Lisp machines
1–10 of 176 posts
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#2"Old man yells at Lisp Machines (And their enthusiasts)"
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#3Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long.
They showed signs that some people there understood that their development environment was it, but it obviously never fully got through to decision-makers: They had CLOE, a 386 PC deployment story in partnership with Gold Hill, but they’d have been far better served by acquiring Gold Hill and porting Genera to the 386 PC architecture.
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#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.
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#5Time 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 cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#6“ 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")
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#7“ 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")
Sun JavaStation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#8Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long. They showed signs that some people there understood that their development environment was it, but it obviously never fully got through to decision-makers: They had CLOE, a 386 PC deployment story in partnership with Gold Hill, but they’d have been far better served by acquiring Gold Hill and porting Genera to the 386 PC architectu…
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.)
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#9The Lisp environments are definitely around, in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.
Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines
#10The Lisp environments are definitely around, in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.
And portacle.