Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines

http://lispm.dyndns.org/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples.html

by akheron • 16 years ago

62 26 16 years ago

lispm.dyndns.org

unwind• 16 years ago

Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces were like, this certainly piqued my interest.

However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.

lispm4• 16 years ago

Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.

kez• 16 years ago

I think you might be underestimating the click-happy masses (myself included) who will happily pump the middle mouse button to queue up some even potentially interesting reads!

dexen• 16 years ago

A quick workaround would be linking via Coral Cache: http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbo...

(note the .nyud.net bit in hostname)

But it won't work right now, as CC can't connect to your server at all...

Edit: more info on http://coralcdn.org/

Natsu2• 16 years ago

You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not....

Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.' bit at the bottom.

yinhm• 16 years ago

Now, it's down.

tdoggette• 16 years ago

The thing is, if these screenshots are interesting, they'll spread from HN to blogs to the programming subreddit, and your iMac will just keep failing.

Even just an archive of these uploaded somewhere with a server would make them accessible.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

One day, when I finally learn VHDL, I'll make a compact Symbolics-compatible Lisp Machine.

I have already done some research on what would be needed to build USB Symbolics/Space Cadet keyboards... Unfortunately, I doubt a keyboard without arrow keys would be very popular beyond a small group.

lispm4• 16 years ago

You can build keyboards with arrow keys. IIRC the keyboards from TI for their Explorer Lisp Machines had arrows, etc. Even with Genera you can use arrow keys. You can configure a new keyboard layout and use that for your keyboard. Genera can for example be used over X11 or on the MacIvory. There keyboards typically have arrows and Genera knows about them...

swombat• 16 years ago

Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection, perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.

brlewis• 16 years ago

There's even mine written primarily in Scheme, apropos to these images: http://ourdoings.com/

aristidb• 16 years ago

Even people with the most superficial interest in Lisp will love to see screenshots, especially if they are described as awesome.

If they can.

cpr• 16 years ago

Boy, that brought back happy memories!

I was running the MIT-EECS department computing machinery back when Symbolics and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc--Greenblatt's competitor) were just getting going, and we had around 8 or 10 of the original LispMs for undergrads to use, wire-wrapped and all. Even those, as slow as they were, were impressive machines for the time, given the 'turtles all the way' down architecture. (Everything written in Lisp, except the microcode.)

Back then, we were using MIT's CHAOSnet, a home-grown competitor to PARC's original 3Mb Ethernet. Unhappy memories of big fat yellow coax everywhere, easily dented. We used a TDR a lot to find kinks in the cable when the network wasn't working well.

The LispMs were years ahead of their time in terms of sheer architectural genius, but were also incredibly baroque--many brilliant hackers adding ornament upon ornament for years...

mrbill• 16 years ago

I recently bought a MacIvory II board set with docs and install media and am awaiting the arrival of parts for the Quadra 700 that I'm going to host it in. I've got a Symbolics "fat" old-style keyboard that I'm going to make the USB adapter for, and then use that to run Genera over X on the LAN.

lispm4• 16 years ago

That works, but you should keep your MacIvory at arms length. The debugger will often pop up on the main console and not the X11 window Console.

davidcollantes• 16 years ago

You are certainly redefining "awesome" on this quasi-sensationalist submission.

Please host the screenshots somewhere decent (not on your home machine) and use a proper title ("UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics List Machines" should suffice).

I want to keep believing HN != Digg.

ptomato• 16 years ago

Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.

smartrevolution• 16 years ago

Rainer Joswig (the guy who hosts the screenshots) did live demos with his machines at the "5. Hamburg Lispers Meeting" in 2008 at my company's office. Here are some photos of the machines and the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397...

The SLIME REPL is very much modeled after the Symbolics REPL. I guess Rainer can tell more about that. Check out the videos on his main site (sorry Rainer, this may increase traffic again. :) ). The most amazing part of his demo for me was, when he inspected a running Lisp process, changed the code and continued from there. The OS is (almost) completely written in Lisp, too...

lispm4• 16 years ago

The link to the screenshots has been posted several times before. This time I see a lot of requests for the screenshots coming in and it still goes on after three days.

Any idea what is causing this?

Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines

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