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Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013

Kalman Reti

341 subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 5 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2024.
  • Presented by Kalman Reti, Symbolics developer

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

51K views13 years ago5 recommendations

History and cultureProgramming languagesLisp and ClojureOperating systemsHistory of computing

Kalman Reti demonstrates the Genera operating system on a Symbolics Lisp Machine emulator, showing its highly interactive, object-oriented environment.

This is a rough introductory demo of the Symbolics Lisp Machine (in Brad Parker's emulator).

Why it's here

5 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a fascinating look at the advanced, integrated development environments of historical Lisp machines.

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See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: link to this video link It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.
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Since he did AI work in the 50's, probably a lot of his work was written in LISP or IPL, which had many of the concepts that LISP later used. Most of his high-profile inventions (Computer mice, Hypertext, Interactive Computers) were first commercialized on LISP machines in the 80s. LISP Machines also pioneered some other concepts such as windowing ystems, graphic rendering, modern networking, garbage collection, etc. There is a fun little demo on youtube here; link to this video . That shows off a LISP machine roughly as it was written in the 80s/90s.
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There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: link The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: link to this video That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Fi…
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If you are into Lisp Machines, this talk on Symbolics by Kalman Reti (who worked there) is worth watching (1h): link If you only have 15 minutes, he gives another demo here: link to this video He has another video where he does some actual hacking (smooth scrolling of sheet music for display while playing an instrument): link
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…ng and similar making available abstract syntax trees and even semantic analysis and type checking results, LLM’s assisting with decompiling binary blobs, and modern hardware (goggles, graphics cards, and so on), I sometimes wonder how close we can come to reproducing that aspect of the Lisp Machine experience on open source operating systems. 1 link to this video 2 link…
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You mean like the command line on Lisp machines, such as this example from Symbolics Genera? link to this video The command line is contextually intelligent and presents interactive graphics and text. Not a simulation of a teletype on a simulation of a character terminal.
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I am really curious about how much parsing and formatting occupy *nix source code. (IIRC 30% of ls), and if it would be a good idea to decouple the way you mention it. my json-infused distro is still on my mind. ps: this lisp machine talk mention how 'programs' (I guess functions) exchanged plain old data rather than serialized ascii streams making things very fast. There are caveats of adress space sharing though but it's another nice hint we could investigate other ways. link to this video
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…l Smalltalk-80 from from Stephane's web site. link This is a very ruft idea how it felt to use a Smalltalk workstation: link link The REPL was what is known in Smalltalk as transcript. Similarly the Interlisp-D workstation also had they own mixture of REPL and editing link Some of the ideas that lived on the Lisp Machines afterwards link link to this video Mesa was a memory safe system programming language created at Xerox, as an evolution from Extended Algol to replace BCPL. Niklaus Wirth based his Modula-2 design on it. Shortly thereafter they updated Mesa into Cedar, which added support for RC with local GC for cycle collection. The system then got called Mesa/Cedar. It allowed the same in…
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Oberon, TempleOS or OpenGenera. These projects are vertical, consistent and use only one programming language. In OpenGenera, everything displayed on the screen is typed and can be retrieved as an s-expression (like in a web browser): link to this video link
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> No, other languages (most of them) don't have real REPLs. What they have, at best can be categorized as "interactive shells". > Try Racket, Clojure, Clojurescript, Fennel, Chez. Give Lisp an honest, heartfelt attempt to learn it. Compared to actual Lisps, some of these have mostly interactive shells. link to this video
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It's JPEG, not PNG, but here you go, a demo by Kalman Reti (one of the Symbolics' developers): link to this video It shows a debug session where C code running on the lisp machine (VLM in this case, unknown variant of the VLM though) is debugged to fix JPEG decompression error.
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Doesn’t have the beautiful Display Postscript/LeX-esque typography that I want, and less said about Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses the better, but even 1980s tech was doing it better: link to this video I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.
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There are 30(!) comments on HN linking to this video, including discussions of Bret Victor's "Learnable programming", using Lisp in production from last year, comparisons with Smalltalk, a thread with examples of beautiful software, and more: link to this video
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