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The story of the rescue of a warehouse worth of manuals of old electronic lab instruments and computer equipment. The 13,000 manuals, initially slated for scrapping, were digitized and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
The people who did this are heroes.
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The complete, text friendly archive of Dr. Dobb's Journal from 1988 to 2009: article text, illustrations, source code, special issues, and more. The illustrations are fax-quality scans but better than nothing.
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This article by @masinter Larry Masinter and Bill VanMelle, published in December of 1981, reported on the state of Common Lisp from the angle of the Interlisp community. It's interesting as it covers the early stage of standardization, when the specification and design work was under way but no implementations were available yet.
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CRT View is a nice tool to view images with retro CRT monitor filters applied. Think of it as cool-retro-term for screenshots.
It's available for Windows, Linux, and macOS but the Linux binary doesn't work on my Linux Mint box as it depends on an outdated library. I had to build CRT View from source which is straightforward.
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To kick the tires of ECL I'm running my McCLIM program ILsee, a tool for viewing Interlisp code files I developed with SBCL. This is made possible by Common Lisp, a deadstable language with multiple high-quality implementations.
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Nikita Lisitsa posted his experience with designing and implementing his own programming language, a game scripting language that's "[...] a weird blend of C++, Rust, Python, Zig, and maybe a few other languages".
https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/making-your-own-programming-language.html
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A digital photo frame that loads photos from a website, and displays them on an M5Stack Tab5 display with software written in uLisp.
http://forum.ulisp.com/t/a-digital-photo-frame-written-in-lisp/1870/1
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The Sky Observer's Guide, a nice booklet with lovely illustrations published in 1959, was one my very first amateur astronomy books. I read the Italian edition in the 1970s and, although I long lost access to it, now I can browse the book and feel the old excitement again.
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Driving a text editor as part of a user interface, as this post describes, reminds me of a similar tradition in Lisp. Think of Emacs and other Lisp Machine editors. Such design patterns were also common on Interlisp-D with the TEdit editor which could also be used as a GUI component.
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The book A Programmer's Guide to COMMON LISP by Deborah Tatar (Digital Press, 1987), along with the errata, is now online with permission from the author.
https://archive.org/details/a-programmers-guide-to-common-lisp
My review of the book:
https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/reading-a-programmers-guide-to-common-lisp
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Matthias Ott on human curation.
We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why.
That’s curation. And it’s not new.
https://newsletter.ownyourweb.site/archive/own-your-web-issue-18-curators
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I bookmarked this 1983 book on Intel 8086/8080 Assembly programming with a focus on the IBM PC hardware. It seems a good resource, especially on the architecture of the processor, but has fewer code snippets and examples than similar books.
https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_8086_8088/mode/2up
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An introduction to using the Algol 60 compiler on TOPS-10.
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What I find interesting about this article by Adele Goldberg on why use Smalltalk, published in 1995, is the mention of the language being fun.
Smalltalk denotes fun and success.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/226239.226260
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An essay on why the Ada programming language was ahead of its time and why its influence is largely unacknowledged.
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A brief history and introduction to the TECO text editor on TOPS-10.
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IBM was fully capable of developing its own BASIC implementation and did just that for some of its early microcomputers, but turned to Microsoft for the PC. This post explains why.
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/why-ibm-turned-to-microsoft-for-basic
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The slide deck of the 2006 talk "The Birth and Passing of Minicomputers: From A Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Perspective" by Gordon Bell.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/history/Minicomputers_The_DEC_aka_Digital_Story_200610.pdf
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This 1983 paper reported on the experience with implementing the same applications on three different Lisp systems: Maclisp on a DEC-20, Franz Lisp on a VAX 11/780, and Interlisp-D on a Dolphin workstation. Despite the graphical environment the poor performance of the Dolphin hardware, one of the slowest Xerox D machines, made the Interlisp-D experience worse than other systems.
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Yorick Phoenix comments on the programming languages he used or was exposed to over his long career in computing. Lots of interesting anecdotes and historical tidbits.
This series of over 30 posts has no table of contents but the posts are arranged in a doubly linked list.
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Andreas @82mhz on the usability issues with reading threads on microblogging and social platforms.
It's cognitively exhausting. It feels like reading a post where there's an ad after every other paragraph. Or one of those sites where one article is spread over ten pages so you constantly have to click next page.
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An overview of programming languages and tools for TOPS-10 development.
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uLisp creator David Johnson-Davies posted an infinite precision artithmetic package for uLisp.
One of the aims of the package was to keep it simple and understandable, so users could extend it with additional functions.
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The history of Lotus Notes and the influence of PLATO. A journey through long forgotten software genres and product categories.
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Bitsavers posted several transcripts of DEC oral history interviews with company leaders, engineers, and researchers such as Ken Olsen, Gordon Bell, Butler Lampson, Bob Taylor, and more.
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Pharo developer Esteban Lorenzano discusses the strenghts and limitations of the Smalltalk class browser and how IDEs could improve on it.
https://blog.lorenzano.eu/smalltalks-browser-unbeatable-yet-not-enough
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François-René Rideau is writing "Lambda: the Ultimate Object - Object Orientation Elucidated" which is still a work in progress. The book offers a theory of Object Orientation that it elucidates in simple terms on top of Functional Programming, with examples and code in Scheme.
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Rupert Lane reconstructed the code of Joseph Weizenbaum's Online Programming Language (OPL).
Based on a printout of source code found among Weizenbaum's papers archived by MIT Libraries, I have reconstructed the language so it can live again for the first time in nearly sixty years on a IBM 7094 emulator running CTSS.
https://timereshared.com/reconstructing-joseph-weizenbaums-opl
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Tempus-Word is a 1990s word processor for the Atari ST that three decades later is still used and, although no longer maintained, is available for download and partially supported. Remarkably, the program has unique features modern word processors miss, see the Information page of the official site.
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The experience of Alan Henning @jalanhenning with coding a game in BASIC by applying the lessons from his past as a professional programmer.
https://troypress.com/coding-for-fun-using-lessons-from-work
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Gábor Melis introduces MGL-PAX, an "untangled" literate programming system for Common Lisp. An untangled system takes advantage from the flexibility of code order of a language to rely less on tangling tools.
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The technical and design challenges of building the image editor of Immich, the popular open source alternative to Google Photos.
It's obviously a highly requested feature, especially for rotation, so what makes it so difficult? Well, it turns out that there are actually a lot of considerations that make it quite complicated.
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Linuxiac @linuxiac suggests four Linux distros for those coming from Windows, two with user interfaces that feel familiar to Windows users and two established distros with a different desktop experience.
https://linuxiac.com/linux-distros-i-recommend-for-those-switching-from-windows
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Using SBCL and McCLIM I wrote an Interlisp tool in modern Common Lisp with a CLIM GUI. That's what happens when one is having too much fun with Lisp.
https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/an-interlisp-file-viewer-in-common-lisp
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Sam Medley of NotebookCheck News tells his experience with moving from Windows 11 to Linux on all his machines at home: a laptop, a desktop, and a media PC.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/I-dumped-Windows-11-for-Linux-and-you-should-too.1190961.0.html
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A short overview and history of the PDP-10 family of DEC computers with references to preservation and emulation resources.
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At over a thousand pages the Common Lisp specification is a thick document but that space is worth it, especially the many welcome examples. The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) specification is about a third that long and has nearly no examples, which makes the many concepts and features harder to understand.
Examples are underrated in software documentation.
https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front
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I'm reading "Presentation Based User Interfaces", the dissertation and later revisions in which Eugene Ciccarelli laid the foundations of GUI frameworks such as Dynamic Windows of Symbolics Genera and CLIM.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41161/AI_WP_219.pdf
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This draft paper dated 1979, apparently never published, gave an historical overview of early programming languages for AI.
The document helps make sense of names like POPLER and QLISP. What's interesting is high level languages such as PLANNER and CONNIVER saw initial interest but little actual use.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vg077ps3762/vg077ps3762.pdf
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I was looking for an Emacs Lisp book that covers how to customize and extend the Emacs environment in Lisp, not just the language or the editor, and a new edition of this book crossed my feeds. I guess I have something to read over the winter holydays.
https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2025-12-10-emacs-lisp-elements-book-version-2
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RE: https://oldbytes.space/@amoroso/115706283832274942
Speaking of Jack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler", Ahmed Thabet reformatted the series and published a prettified and browsable version. Nice.
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Between 1988 and 1995 Jack Crenshaw posted on Usenet "Let's Build a Compiler", a tutorial series on writing a Pascal compiler that generates 68K Assembly. 35 years later Eli Bendersky revisited the series and rewrote the compiler in Python to generate WebAssembly.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2025/revisiting-lets-build-a-compiler
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Cees de Groot @cdegroot explains what Common Lisp library building and packaging problems ASDF and Quicklisp solve. A clear overview of these tools and what they do.
https://cdegroot.com/programming/commonlisp/2025/11/26/cl-ql-asdf.html
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Manu is launching a new web discovery resource, the newsletter Dealgorithmed.
A newsletter about the small web, the poetic web, the quiet web, the web many say we lost years ago, yet it's still here, ready to be rediscovered by those who care.
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RE: https://oldbytes.space/@amoroso/115502489433158577
The light theme seems more popular than I expected. I use the light theme too but, when cataract came knocking last year, I learned the hard way the importance of the dark theme.
https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/the-faded-world-my-experience-with-cataract
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Multi-language IDEs that interact with interpreters via protocols are now common, from classic Emacs with its inferior process protocols to VS Code with LSP and similar modern environments.
This paper described an early exploration of these ideas: a language-independend, Interlisp-based environment that interfaced with language processors over the ARPANET. In 1974.
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What theme do you use on the majority of your desktop and mobile devices?
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What helped me deliver my RetroChallgence 2024 project on time? Prior experience with the Interlisp API of NoteCards and the nature of Lisp and Lisp systems.
https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/how-lisp-helped-my-retrochallenge-2024-project
#RC2024 #RetroChallenge #retrocomputing #interlisp #NoteCards
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RetroChallenge announced the results of RC2024/10 and I'm honored to be among the winners. I entered with the WebCard project written in Interlisp, a NoteCards extension for visiting websites.
Thanks to the organizers, voters, and judges and congrats to all the entrants, especially @psychotimmy who won the Grand Prize.
https://www.retrochallenge.org/2025/10/rc202410-resultsless-than-year-late.html
https://github.com/pamoroso/webcard
https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/tag:WebCard
#RC2024 #RetroChallenge #retrocomputing #interlisp #NoteCards