#lispmachine — Public Fediverse posts

At almost 800 pages The Architecture of Symbolic Computers by Peter Kogge (McGraw-Hill, 1991) is a massive tome on Lisp Machines, logic systems, and other symbolic computer architectures.

https://archive.org/details/architectureofsy0000kogg

#LispMachine #lisp #prolog #FunctionalProgramming #retrocomputing #book

🚀 Ah, the glorious #future where the mighty Lisp Machine rules all—except it can't handle a few extra page requests. 🤖💥 Apparently, inventing the future requires more downtime than uptime. 📉 Maybe they'll upgrade to a Commodore 64 next. 😂
https://www.patrickdomanico.com/bpm/2026/06/16/inventing-the-future-one-lisp-machine-at-a-time/ #LispMachine #Humor #TechDowntime #Commodore64 #HackerNews #ngated

Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

https://www.patrickdomanico.com/bpm/2026/06/16/inventing-the-future-one-lisp-machine-at-a-time/

#HackerNews #LispMachine #FutureTech #Innovation #Programming #AI

And I think that's the important bit. It hits a sweet spot for functionality and ubiquity, _and_ it is freeform enough that I don't have to think in advance how I want to use it—I literally adapt queries and files to the project I'm working on, as I go.

It's a "whatever" box in the context of, "I'm down for whatever you're into, boss" box. But it will do "whatever", deterministically. By cleverly combining pretty, extensible, and customizable rendering of the results of queries over an ad-hoc #markdown-based datastore.

Now, I know that (especially after reading the mention of #symbolics #lispmachine in the first post), someone's gonna say "but emacs!". And sure, follow your bliss, not stepping into that one. Suffice it to say, I'm well past mid career and have tried to love Emacs, perennially, since I started. I have accepted that it meets neither my workflow nor aesthetic needs (and I'll thank you for trusting me on that).

I thought, for a while, that maybe I could make #VSCode be the environment I could use to do this, what with MarkdownPreviewEnhanced and other plugins. But that is an IDE optimized for developing _other_ applications, which is different from building a boat whilst sailing it.

Anyway, this is turning into something that should be a blog post, and I don't expect anyone will read this far anyway, but I thought I'd stop and give credit where credit is due. #obsidian is the closed thing to an ad-hoc productivity operating system I've ever used, and it's quietly become one of the most important pieces of software I have.

Nicely done, @obsidian and community. And nicely done, @gruber and #aaronschwartz and everyone who's made #markdown what it is.

It is #Symbolics Virtual #LispMachine running "natively" on Mac M4.

quite the "bird"/"plane" being modeled..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSQ6gATnQU&list=PLWRTLH_j65YganGU8ROO633CZQrAeqVTI&index=11

#LispMachine #Symbolics

Imagine having one of these jobs back in the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w&list=PLWRTLH_j65YganGU8ROO633CZQrAeqVTI

#Lisp #Symbolics #LispMachine

@screwlisp

You can pick up the document 'Signalling and Handling Conditions' from this index page:

http://nhplace.com/kent/ZL/

It was longer than I thought it would be, but I think you'll find it interesting to see what the Zetalisp condition system (which inspired the Common Lisp condition system) looked like.

In spirit, it was much the same. The biggest differences are:

* The CL system has 'active' restarts, where the ZL system had a passive thing where you returned a value to the case context and hoped that it would do the thing you wanted. It felt quite a bit more error-prone (if you'll pardon the reuse of 'error' here, maybe I should say 'mistake-prone').

* The ZL condition system offers a lot of really low-level stuff that did not seem proper for CL.

* The set of operations offered in ZL was richer, but also a lot more complicated, I thought, and I worried people would not really see what it was trying to do.

* Obviously, the ZL system was based on Flavors, not CLOS, and made reference to a lot of LispM-specific packages.

* The document was published in January, 1983 and identifies itself as part of Symbolics Release 4.0.

There are other differences as well.

#Zetalisp #LispMachine #LispMachines #Symbolics #LispM
#ConditionHandling #ConditionSystem #ErrorSystem #ErrorHandling #CommonLisp #CL #Flavors #CLOS #History #ComputerHistory
#InternetArchive #Bitsavers

Any attempt to reimagine a (viable) #LispMachine would not just recreate what was, it would have to imagine what could've been and how lisp machines may have evolved since 1990s… eg: support for GUI, multitasking, WiFi, internet, World Wide Web, multi-gesture touchpads, touchscreens, multi-core cpus, 8 GB RAM, virtual machines, … just to name a few

This 1981 paper described an online help browser and authoring environment for TI or MIT Lisp Machines. The paper is interesting as it also briefly reviewed the state of online help systems at the time.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1015579.810973

#retrocomputing #lisp #LispMachine

Tim Bradshaw discusses the myths around Lisp Machines and why they were probably never competitive.

https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines

#LispMachine #retrocomputing #lisp

The Lambda Papers: When LISP Got Turned Into a Microprocessor https://hackaday.com/2025/10/20/the-lambda-papers-when-lisp-got-turned-into-a-microprocessor/ #ArtificialIntelligence #Lispmachine #commonlisp #History #lisp

The Lambda Papers: When LISP Got Turned Into a Microprocessor - The physical layout of the SCHEME-78 LISP-based microprocessor by Steele and Sussm... - https://hackaday.com/2025/10/20/the-lambda-papers-when-lisp-got-turned-into-a-microprocessor/ #artificialintelligence #lispmachine #commonlisp #history #lisp

In the 1980s some Xerox Lisp Machines came with an IBM PC/XT expansion card that allowed running MS-DOS software from the Interlisp-D environment, like the black window of a spreadsheet program at the bottom left. This screenshot is from a flyer of the Xerox 1186 AI workstation.

https://groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c/aCC34TmRSmc/m/KQwufgfABQAJ

#interlisp #msdos #LispMachine #retrocomputing

@demiguru

As far as I know, in Lisp Machine, the entire software, from the operating system into user applications are all available as gigantic Lisp functions.

We can use the functions in our code. We can also edit the code, even the code of the program we are currently running, save the code, then reload it.

Yes, the operating system itself can be edited, saved and reloaded.

But it is different with Emacs. It is basically an elisp interpreter with some functionalities to aid text editing. These two are all C code.

They cannot be edited, saved and reload.

Emacs in Unix possibly is different with Emacs (EINE, ZWEINE) on Lisp Machine.

#GNUEmacs #Emacs #LispMachine

@crandel @alerque @Zenie @weavejester

@simon_brooke

GNU Emacs as a Lisp Machine surely is very nice. But Daniel Weinreb himself disagree with that.

Is it possible that Emacs is only Lisp Machine in spirit only?

Here is the link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250427073638/http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_rms.html

Note: on the debate about the original creator of Emacs, whether it is David Moon & Guy Steele or Richard Stallman, I am completely neutral.

Edit: I have ever heard somewhere that Maxima is quite similar with GNU Emacs. At the core of Maxima is an implementation of Common Lisp. Maxima is just sitting on top of the Common Lisp.

#GNUEmacs #Emacs #LispMachine #Symbolic #LMI #RMS #DavidMoon #Maxima #CommonLisp

@demiguru @Zenie @weavejester

It's 1986 and you want to use Interlisp-D on your Xerox workstation. This primer will get you up to speed with booting a Lisp image, handling floppy disks, using the mouse, transferring files to a VAX, and interacting with the environment. Some of the material is obsolete but gives an idea of what it was like to use a Lisp Machine in the 1980s.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp-d/198510_Koto/3102300_Interlisp-D_A_Friendly_Primer_Nov86.pdf

#interlisp #retrocomputing #LispMachine

@screwlisp Thought you would be interested in this.

On the ex-Symbolics employees mailing list somebody posted a link to a "history of the Lisp machine".

https://youtu.be/sV7C6Ezl35A?si=S4uh4-JXKC2_7lOR

It's kind of long and so I didn't watch the whole thing, but just skipped around a little bit. Somebody else who did watch it said,

'Fascinating exposition. Given his mispronunciations of "CADR" and "Macsyma", it's clear that he wasn't in the room where it happened, nor spoke to anyone who was. But I can't quarrel with his research or cause-and-effect analysis of both the industry as a whole and Symbolics in particular.'

#symbolics #lispMachine

The document preparation system of Symbolics Lisp Machines consisted of two main hypertext tools, the Concordia authoring environment and the Document Examiner documentation browser and delivery interface. These papers describe the tools.

Supporting Document Development with Concordia
https://archive.org/details/smbx-concordia-paper-1988

Document Examiner: delivery interface for hypertext documents
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/317426.317448

#LispMachine #symbolics #lisp #retrocomputing

@CharlieMcHenry

Shades of Lisp Machines.

#Python #Lisp #LispMachine

Android #Emacs 31.0.50 / Termux screencast, running Phel #lisp #PHP web application in localhost for development: https://nc.contabo-storage-1.lti.la/s/JzRSfFo6L6GADkt #unix #lispmachine

@keyboards @NanoRaptor #LispMachine #Apple