#lispmachines — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #lispmachines, aggregated by home.social.
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🎉🚀 Behold: #Chaosnet, the 1975 cutting-edge tech that’s basically just computers yelling at each other without a referee. MIT’s #AI Lab decided to sprinkle some chaos on their Lisp Machines, probably because who needs organization when you can have pandemonium? 🤖💥 Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature... or maybe just a really old network. 🙃
https://tumbleweed.nu/r/lm-3/uv/amber.html #MIT #LispMachines #TechHistory #Pandemonium #HackerNews #ngated -
🎉🚀 Behold: #Chaosnet, the 1975 cutting-edge tech that’s basically just computers yelling at each other without a referee. MIT’s #AI Lab decided to sprinkle some chaos on their Lisp Machines, probably because who needs organization when you can have pandemonium? 🤖💥 Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature... or maybe just a really old network. 🙃
https://tumbleweed.nu/r/lm-3/uv/amber.html #MIT #LispMachines #TechHistory #Pandemonium #HackerNews #ngated -
You can pick up the document 'Signalling and Handling Conditions' from this index page:
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 -
You can pick up the document 'Signalling and Handling Conditions' from this index page:
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 -
The always awesome Asianometry channel covered Lisp, early AI, and the Lisp Machines earlier this year:
“A Cult AI Computer’s Boom And Bust”, Asianometry (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7C6Ezl35A).
#Video #Asianometry #Lisp #AI #LispMachines #Symbolics #YouTube
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The always awesome Asianometry channel covered Lisp, early AI, and the Lisp Machines earlier this year:
“A Cult AI Computer’s Boom And Bust”, Asianometry (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7C6Ezl35A).
#Video #Asianometry #Lisp #AI #LispMachines #Symbolics #YouTube
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Wise, sobering words 😞:
“The Lost Cause Of The Lisp Machines”, Tim Bradshaw (https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/).
Via HN: https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/
On Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/rifpe8/lost_cause_lisp_machines
#Lisp #LispMachines #Symbolics #Nostalgia #Programming #IDE #Hardware
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Wise, sobering words 😞:
“The Lost Cause Of The Lisp Machines”, Tim Bradshaw (https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/).
Via HN: https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/
On Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/rifpe8/lost_cause_lisp_machines
#Lisp #LispMachines #Symbolics #Nostalgia #Programming #IDE #Hardware
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@jaruzel @StefanoGaivota interesting! To me, #retrocomputing covers early #eightbit (and #sixteenbit) personal computers, and #vintagecomputing covers #mainframe, #minicomputer and #workstation machines (the latter category being composed of #LispMachines, graphical #unix workstations and of course the #XeroxParc machines).
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@jaruzel @StefanoGaivota interesting! To me, #retrocomputing covers early #eightbit (and #sixteenbit) personal computers, and #vintagecomputing covers #mainframe, #minicomputer and #workstation machines (the latter category being composed of #LispMachines, graphical #unix workstations and of course the #XeroxParc machines).
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@jaruzel @StefanoGaivota interesting! To me, #retrocomputing covers early #eightbit (and #sixteenbit) personal computers, and #vintagecomputing covers #mainframe, #minicomputer and #workstation machines (the latter category being composed of #LispMachines, graphical #unix workstations and of course the #XeroxParc machines).
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@jaruzel @StefanoGaivota interesting! To me, #retrocomputing covers early #eightbit (and #sixteenbit) personal computers, and #vintagecomputing covers #mainframe, #minicomputer and #workstation machines (the latter category being composed of #LispMachines, graphical #unix workstations and of course the #XeroxParc machines).