Archive of Lisp Machine, Inc | Hacker News Reader

Archive of Lisp Machine, Inc

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130 pointskristianp29 comments

Have to say this is why HN is great. My dad’s been very sick (Parkinson’s) for the last couple of years and we haven’t been able to talk much about his old work on Lisp. Pretty cool to be able to grep for holloway and see snippets of what he was up to a few decades ago. Thanks to whoever put this together and posted.

Is your father Jack Holloway of Symbolics and MIT AI Lab fame?

Yep that’s him.

Here’s some meeting notes I found browsing around https://github.com/jrm-code-project/LISP-Machine/blob/master...

Probably this meeting was quite late, prospects seem quite bleak

Great find, thanks for the link!

> We are down to our last chance. We have to stop doing stupid things immediately.

> We are up against a large, well financed company which is basically doing intelligent things. If we cannot achieve "war-time" type unity and work intensity levels, we have no chance and should quit now.

I was going to say, the wording of this is very questionable; if the marketing department is using phrases like "stupid things" and "should quit now", it's definitely time to quit.

But on learning more about the history of Lisp Machines, Inc., especially at this point when it was reincarnated as GigaMos Systems - these meeting notes are just further confirmation that the company was doomed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems

There is an emulator to run this [1].

[1] https://github.com/dseagrav/ld

But, what about the keyboard[0]? ;)

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

I was fascinated by purpose of those 'emojis' (thumb up etc) on the right of the keyboard. But Xah Lee says they are "not documented in manual. Not used by default" [0]

[0]:http://xahlee.info/kbd/space-cadet_keyboard.html

I've been told that you could use the thumbs-up/thumbs-down keys to respond to prompts from programs asking you yes/no with the 'yes-or-no-p function.

very interesting review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw

7:25 here he says those appears to be arrows keys ?

Good point as the keyboard doesn't otherwise have any arrow keys ... though the later Symbolics keyboard, which lacks these emoji keys, doesn't have arrow keys either.

For Nix users, here it is packaged[0]

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/104276/files

And bitsavers appears to have the documentation: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/lmi/LMI_Docs/

It would be cool to have a LISP Machine VM that you could boot up. Does something like that exist ?

What is wrong with the emulator in the link I posted ?

There are also emulators for the other Lisp Machines.

In addition to your link, you can find links to two other LispM emulators here: https://lisp-machine.org/

There are three other emulators linked from there, two for the TI Explorer and one for the MIT CADR.

There is probably nothing wrong with it. But booting up a VM is quick and convenient, whereas for example searching through the bitsavers archive for the right ROM images isn't, just for one thing.

I assume that you mean a Linux VM that is preconfigured to launch the Lisp Machine emulator as a userspace process in full screen. Yes, that would be handy.

For the curious, there is more information on the K-machine here:

http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm

I am always amazed the kind of dedication people has for niche computer history! kudo to them!

What is the legal status of this?

All of the assets of the last owner of this IP were seized by the Canadian government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems

That's even more intriguing. I assume sadly that it would now be under "Crown Copyright", which is like normal copyright but in just about every respect worse - for one thing Crown Copyright has no time limit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright

I'm not sure it would, this IP wasn't "prepared or published by or under the direction or control of Her Majesty or any government department".

At a guess: somewhere in between "probably nobody cares" and "clone quickly if you're interested"...

The company also haven't been around since 1986, so unless there is some litigious people who used to work there/owned the company, it's hard to imagine someone will do something substantial about this repository.

Litigious people: check.

Working with some strange partners, you don't want to mess with: check.

The second repository of this user seems to have been hanging on GitHub for years (judging by commit history; could have been uploaded later). Still, it seems so far that no one cares about this repo.

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