parentheses all the way down

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > parentheses all the way down

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

if you have a spare x86-64 virtual machine handy, you can boot the new demo of Mezzano that was released a few days ago, and enjoy an operating system built almost entirely in Common Lisp

as far as I know the only part of the OS itself that's not written in either Lisp or a little inline assembly is the tiny first stage boot loader, everything else is Lisp including the TCP stack (including IPv6) and all of the device drivers

unfortunately the user experience of the system isn't anything like a classic Lisp Machine: there's no status/mode line, no dired, no zmacs, just a few basic applications including an emacs-style editor (of course) and a simple Lisp listener atop a rudimentary compositing window system

fortunately it's still pretty straightforward to modify while it's running: for the majority of Mezzano's code, you don't have to batch recompile and restart for your changes to take effect, you can just modify the code and reload, and watch your modifications take effect

someone build awful.lisp now so it can be a poasting station

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 01:48

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 00:23

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

there was some doofus who was all "yay now let's build a modern web browser in Lisp so we can access Wikipedia!"

I don't think he "gets it"

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 07:14

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

wrote AI-related software at defense contractors, petroleum companies, banks and financial services firms, telecom companies, and university and corporate research labs

and in their off hours they wrote Usenet newsreaders and a couple video games (Spacewar and Asteroids, the Asteroids game really looks like the arcade, including the phosphor persistence)

Symbolics was also big in 3D, they were basically Silicon Graphics before SGI was, but they were so goddamn slow to update their hardware (hanging everything on "Lisp is a secret weapon") that one year, all of SIGGRAPH was demoing with S-Graphics and the next year everyone was demoing with GL on Irix

there wasn't nearly as much of a hacking scene as people think, it turns out, because not many places will let random undergrads get serious time on a $50,000 workstation that they're not even allowed to unbox without a technician present (seriously), sign an individual software license for, and pay 10-20% per year indefinitely for maintenance

and people couldn't even take decommissioned systems home or anything, Symbolics demanded proof of decommissioning in order to allow you to stop paying maintenance; if you wanted to take a system home that work was decommissioning, you had to pay a license transfer fee ($5K) and then pay maintenance indefinitely ($1K or more per year)

but you did get to use Lisp for everything, and before the First AI Winter, that was all some people really needed

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 09:58

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

ultravoices posted:

like all the special purpose minicomputers they were slaughtered when consumer processors and memory got cheap enough that you didn't need bespoke hardware anymore to get useful performance. you don't need a 50k workstation with a squillion dollar service contract when you can just order some 386s/486s.

what's saddest about this is that they actually sort of understood this

even before the MacIvory "LispM on a NuBus card" they had the UX series, which were a different configuration of the XL400 and XL1200 main CPU cards that could be used in a Sun (with 9U VME slots, like a Sun 3 or pre-SBus Sun 4) and be accessed via the command line and X11

companies like petroleum exploration companies would have these racked in Sun servers with a "check in/check out" system for logging into (since they were single user systems) but it meant they could deploy their applications using Xterms or low-end Suns instead of dealing with a full 300kg LispM per seat

around the same time (late 80s) they also introduced CLOE, their "Common Lisp Operating Environment," where you could take software you'd developed in Genera and, with quite a few restrictions, compile it for deployment on commodity i386 systems running DOS or, once it came out, Windows 3

if they'd had a skunkworks to use their CLOE code generator to port their entire software stack to i386, even if it demanded 32MB or more of memory, they could have had way more life than they did by continuing to peruse custom hardware

and having shipped CLOE at all means that someone inside had at least some idea that commodity hardware was worth considering�maybe I and some friends need to start trying to dig out that oral history, since even their final effort (OpenGenera on Alpha) didn't go in that direction

eschaton fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Apr 15, 2017

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 00:20

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

speaking of OpenGenera, the Virtual Lisp Machine was ported to x86-64, and someone has actually "dockerized" it to work around some of its weird early-90s requirements (wanting to run as root and to have raw network access) if you want to give it a try

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 00:22

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

The Management posted:

I just watched a 13 minute video to understand what a lisp machine actually does and now I want to kill myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

because it's an improvement on its successors, right?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 05:00

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

people who talk about Lisp as a high level or functional language have never dealt with ldb or loop

most real world Lisp is imperative and/or OO, only students doing coursework write code functional-style or with needless recursion

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 00:54

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

also it feels like my thread here has really "made it" now

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 00:55

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

someone wrote an NTP client in Lisp and I think a friend is going to port it to Genera so he doesn't need to set the clock after turning on his XL1201

after all, almost every IC on the densely packed 40cm by 40cm CPU card is socketed, except the loving Mostek MK48-series "timekeeper" which doesn't have a user-replaceable battery and isn't rechargeable

at least Genera doesn't really use the timekeerper's nvram for anything, unlike Sun hardware, but at least Sun socketed the drat chips

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 07:34

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

akadajet posted:

I need a system with a rub out key

even if it needs a sizable fraction of an hour of hardware maintenance per hour of uptime?

this recycling company got a Symbolics 3640 in (someone just dropped it off!) and they started putting boards on eBay, so I contacted them about whether they had the whole system

they said "sure, want us to power test it for you?"

never do this, Symbolics used a cheap vendor for the PSUs and they can fail in ways that damage the system, they need careful recapping and testing before you even attempt to run the system

also you can't just sub in a modern PC PSU because they need a lot of amps at interesting voltages, like both +5.2V and -5.2V for the ECL bits

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 19:38

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

we should honestly be talking about Lisp much more than we do, especially compared to crimes like the plangs

# ¿ Apr 17, 2017 19:40

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

The Management posted:

many years ago I applied for an internship at a company that did graphics software. they were using lisp on SGI machines. you will be surprised to hear that they stopped existing a few years later.

I didn't get the job

was it Nichimen N-World, which became Winged Edge Mirai, which is now Izware Mirai? because that would have been pretty cool, their code is derived from the original Symbolics S-Graphics suite which Nichimen (a big Symbolics graphics customer) bought when Symbolics was in bankruptcy and ported from ZetaLisp on Genera to Common Lisp on Irix

I've actually started to look into the current state of those assets, they'd be great to obtain and release to the public in some way

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 23:29

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

The Management posted:

yes. wow, I had completely forgotten the name. it was Nichimen Graphics. and I was clearly not qualified for the job at the time being a dumbass kid in my first few college years.

still pretty cool!

# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 20:52

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

so Daniel Seagraves, the author of the Meroko TI Explorer emulator, has released his LambdaDelta LMI Lambda emulator

it needs a bunch of stuff from BitSavers and a bunch of setup to run, but evidently it does run

# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 20:54

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 00:23

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

eschaton posted:

so Daniel Seagraves, the author of the Meroko TI Explorer emulator, has released his LambdaDelta LMI Lambda emulator

it needs a bunch of stuff from BitSavers and a bunch of setup to run, but evidently it does run

# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 22:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > parentheses all the way down