Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines | Hacker News Reader

Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines

lispm.dyndns.org

62 pointsakheron26 comments

Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection, perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.

There's even mine written primarily in Scheme, apropos to these images: http://ourdoings.com/

Boy, that brought back happy memories!

I was running the MIT-EECS department computing machinery back when Symbolics and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc--Greenblatt's competitor) were just getting going, and we had around 8 or 10 of the original LispMs for undergrads to use, wire-wrapped and all. Even those, as slow as they were, were impressive machines for the time, given the 'turtles all the way' down architecture. (Everything written in Lisp, except the microcode.)

Back then, we were using MIT's CHAOSnet, a home-grown competitor to PARC's original 3Mb Ethernet. Unhappy memories of big fat yellow coax everywhere, easily dented. We used a TDR a lot to find kinks in the cable when the network wasn't working well.

The LispMs were years ahead of their time in terms of sheer architectural genius, but were also incredibly baroque--many brilliant hackers adding ornament upon ornament for years...

Rainer Joswig (the guy who hosts the screenshots) did live demos with his machines at the "5. Hamburg Lispers Meeting" in 2008 at my company's office. Here are some photos of the machines and the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397...

The SLIME REPL is very much modeled after the Symbolics REPL. I guess Rainer can tell more about that. Check out the videos on his main site (sorry Rainer, this may increase traffic again. :) ). The most amazing part of his demo for me was, when he inspected a running Lisp process, changed the code and continued from there. The OS is (almost) completely written in Lisp, too...

Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces were like, this certainly piqued my interest.

However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.

Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.

You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not....

Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.' bit at the bottom.

You are suggesting that he give screenshots of copyrighted software a CC license? ....Right.

How is that different from say, a CC licensed photograph of a car or an iPhone?

I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better than this.

---

A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them are.

Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book? Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An amazing discovery!)

Tell me, do you and all your upvoters think you know better than Wikimedia Commons when it writes (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots) :

> Screenshots are subject to the copyright of the displayed work, may it be a video, television program, or a computer program.

Do you think you know better than the librarian who wrote http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jiscleg... ? Or how about http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 or http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing... or any of a dozen links you could have found in seconds googling 'copyright screenshot'? Notice the only question is whether fair use will defend you when you infringe on copyright by making screenshots and not whether screenshots are copyrighted at all, because they are copyrighted.

Do you, in fact, have the slightest argument besides a specious analogy?

I apologize if my question came off as presumptuous and/or snarky. My question was genuine. I assumed from the up-votes that my question's underlying basis was indeed correct.

Clearly, taking a photograph of an art work does not automatically create a copyright free version of the art. Nor does scanning a book.

Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?

Modders, please upvote parent and downmod my previous comment.

> Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?

It might, but there you are getting into vagaries of fair use. Dialogue, music, trademarked goods - all these things can creep into a video or a photograph and taint it with derivativeness. (Is there a trademarked Coca-Cola prominent in your photograph? You may be in trouble. Is there a TV in the corner playing _The Simpsons_? Lessig gives an example where copyright-clearing a few seconds of that TV crippled a documentary.)

For example, a sculpture is copyrighted and photographs thereof derivatives & copyrighted, except in Germany which has specially granted the photographer protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama

Is there a nifty Apple-designed good coughiPhonecough in the picture in question? Now you have to worry about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_right

Did you know buildings are copyrighted? http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/ip_photography.htm#1.6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_th...

Your point is well-taken, but I think that Symbolics is now defunct? Granted, the copyrights don't vanish, but who knows where they transferred to, if anywhere.

To http://www.symbolics-dks.com/

A quick workaround would be linking via Coral Cache: http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbo...

(note the .nyud.net bit in hostname)

But it won't work right now, as CC can't connect to your server at all...

Edit: more info on http://coralcdn.org/

The thing is, if these screenshots are interesting, they'll spread from HN to blogs to the programming subreddit, and your iMac will just keep failing.

Even just an archive of these uploaded somewhere with a server would make them accessible.

I think you might be underestimating the click-happy masses (myself included) who will happily pump the middle mouse button to queue up some even potentially interesting reads!

Now, it's down.

One day, when I finally learn VHDL, I'll make a compact Symbolics-compatible Lisp Machine.

I have already done some research on what would be needed to build USB Symbolics/Space Cadet keyboards... Unfortunately, I doubt a keyboard without arrow keys would be very popular beyond a small group.

You can build keyboards with arrow keys. IIRC the keyboards from TI for their Explorer Lisp Machines had arrows, etc. Even with Genera you can use arrow keys. You can configure a new keyboard layout and use that for your keyboard. Genera can for example be used over X11 or on the MacIvory. There keyboards typically have arrows and Genera knows about them...

Even people with the most superficial interest in Lisp will love to see screenshots, especially if they are described as awesome.

If they can.

I recently bought a MacIvory II board set with docs and install media and am awaiting the arrival of parts for the Quadra 700 that I'm going to host it in. I've got a Symbolics "fat" old-style keyboard that I'm going to make the USB adapter for, and then use that to run Genera over X on the LAN.

That works, but you should keep your MacIvory at arms length. The debugger will often pop up on the main console and not the X11 window Console.

The link to the screenshots has been posted several times before. This time I see a lot of requests for the screenshots coming in and it still goes on after three days.

Any idea what is causing this?

You are certainly redefining "awesome" on this quasi-sensationalist submission.

Please host the screenshots somewhere decent (not on your home machine) and use a proper title ("UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics List Machines" should suffice).

I want to keep believing HN != Digg.

Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com