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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion this person seems like one of those 10x people. Amazing job.

Gotta agree with you there - IIRC, he's also working on an Alto, plus a Symbolics LISP machine - and I think, IIRC, he helped to get the IBM 1401 transistor mainframe at the Mountain View Computer History Museum working, too.

Just looked that last one up - yep.

http://www.righto.com/2018/09/the-printer-that-wouldnt-print...

The other two:

http://www.righto.com/2018/03/a-1970s-disk-drive-that-wouldn...

But I seem to be wrong on the Lisp machine? I couldn't find anything on it, but I could have sworn somebody has been working on getting one into operating condition for a while now (it's been a slow process)...

Anybody know?

Just to keep things straight... The Lisp machine isn't me and I don't know anyone working on one. As for the IBM 1401, I can't take credit for getting it working; I joined the team later and help keep it running. Currently I'm working on an IBM 360/50 microcode emulator and reverse-engineering an early FPGA chip.

There is one Lisp Machine renovation project that I know of [1]. Haven't been any updates for a while, the dates against the blog posts are wrong too.

[1] https://www.orinrin.land/lispm/

10x kind of implies that they are doing something actually useful. :-)

From whose point of view? A mythical “10x” working at a Californian small startup making IoT juice machines isn't necessarily doing anything more useful.

I think he's the guy from the blog and he's making a joke

Answering the "What if...?" questions may not be productive but is definitely still useful.

"...But when wood first yields to metal, one more thing is made: and that is the sculptor."

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