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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

The classic joke in here is that if you look up "fascism" in the index, it goes to the section about logging in. User authentication wasn't part of the dream, so having been forced to build it, they embedded a dig on it right in the manual.

https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/files.xml#fascism

I think there are a few other jokes in the index but I don't recall what they are.

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not surprising since many of the early lisp people grew up on ITS which had a built in 'crash' command available to all users which crashed the system..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...

It goes on to say

> The Lisp Machine uses your username (or the part that follows the last period) as a first guess for your password (this happens to take no extra time).

Looks like they won in the long end and got a perhaps semi-surreptitious way to at least opt-in to an open environment.

"Once a password is recorded for one host, the system uses that password as the guess if you connect to a file server on another host."

That was probably Stallman's doing. He wrote most of the LISP machine code.

The other side of the argument.

https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/

Also interesting bits about the fall of Symbolics, the AI winter, and why Lisp adoption waned as a result.

> He wrote most of the LISP machine code.

That's nonsense. The Lisp Machine code was written by several people, some which had significant contributions.

Indeed. Before they left to found Symbolics, David Moon, Howard Cannon, Dan Weinreb, and others (I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one name) wrote the vast bulk of the system. I think Richard Greenblatt wrote most of the microcode (he also did most of the hardware design and construction).

After Symbolics formed, RMS did an amazing job at reimplementing many of the new features Moon and company were adding, so as to keep the MIT version of the system at rough parity with the Symbolics version. So his name belongs in the story, but not first.

The MIT version was commercialized, too. Lisp Machine Inc. employed Stallman and Greenblatt, and was back primarily by Texas Instruments.

Both Lisp Machines Inc. and Symbolics were selling the MIT version before redesigning it into their own brand new products, the LMI-LAMBDA and the Symbolics 3600.

If that's the case, then why is Emacs such a poor facsimile of the LispM environments? ;-)

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