Re: Am I the insane one or what?

[joswig@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Rainer Joswig)]

>   much fun hacking I dont want to stop. I'm hooked! Perhaps somebody
>   somewhere should be shot for not marketing this thing properly. 
>
>You will have to get in line behind N ex-Symbolics employees, such as
>myself.

Me too. I love our Symbolics machines. We even have a fully
functional 3600.

The problem is, nobody knows these machines. I am reading about
OOP operating systems. Nobody mentions lispmachines. I am reading
about window systems. Again nobody mentions lispmachines. I am
reading the LISP FAQ. Where is the question "What is a Lispmachine?"
answered (or asked ?) ?

In a little hobby mailbox network in Germany we currently have
a discussion about these things. Most of the people thought
you can't do any low-level programming in LISP. Some of them
will now learn LISP. You have to tell the people!

>                                                                   I think
>   we users of LISP and SMBX need to slow down and drop a few crumbs of
>   what we may know to be pale shadows of the "real" thing so that the mass
>   market can follow.  Mini-Genera on a PC for example. We will know it
>   sucks - they wont. We blased a trail into the woods with a blade so
>   sharp that we got caught up in the act of cutting down the trees: turn
>   around - there's no one behind. It's probably too late now, sad isnt it?

Well I don't know. Even Wirth is coming with new little systems
(Oberon). Why don't we have a lisp equivalent to Oberon (but better).
A tiny OS with it's own windowing system and usable on PCs at home.

Well, maybe Apple is developing something, I don't know. Their Common
Lisp is quite nice, but again not enough people know about it and
I haven't seen any articles about it in computer magazines for a
long time.

My (and Ralf Moeller's I think) favourite would be a LISP environment
on top of a SGI (with a 64bit R4400) with a 3D graphical interface.
Its a shame, but there were Lispmachines with SGI-boards along time
ago! Now they are gone.

>connection.  Double wow!  Before you know it, they'll have a process
>that tracks the mouse and updates state variables in a pointer object.

It's so sad...


Rainer Joswig

Email: joswig@informatik.uni-hamburg.de