https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o
My favourite Sutherland quote:
When asked, “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?” Sutherland replied, “Well, I didn't know it was hard.” -- http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987
With a whopping 256 KiB of memory (64 Ki of 36 bit words); not many systems could afford that much memory in the '60s. Part of the MIT style of doing things is to have a large uniform address space, e.g. later the AI Lab got DARPA to fund a 1 MiB memory bank for their first generation KA PDP-10, that's one full address space, 18 bits of 36 bit words (a cons cell was a word treating each 18 bit half as a pointer). I was told that was considered to be beyond the state of the art back then, and this account strongly supports that: http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/moby.htm And, yeah, I can see the 4 extra bits per word theoretically available in case one plane failed inspiring Greenblatt, "the father of the Lisp Machine" and company to do a tagged architecture. (When I showed up in 1979, I was told MACLISP for the PDP-10/Decsystem-20 used the "big bag of pages" GC method, every page had only one type of object in it; no cache except on KL processors, so originally no locality penalty.)
I suspect Smalltalk has a larger object size granularity than Lisp in part because it was developed to run on systems with multiple banks of 64 K of 16 bit memory (up to 4; the Xerox Alto). The cost of bank switching is lower the larger the object to be addressed or swapped in (note, this is my personal theory, I have nothing to back it up except my study of these systems in the early '80s and intuition).
Imagine, say, starting a 3d printing company today and only having it become a ubiquitous household item in 2050, knowing the potential and practical use they have today.
The TX-2 was a Navy purchase. I also wonder how much of modernity is tied directly to the US's rise as a super-power post WWII. You don't build things like these unless you have worries about another world war breaking out.
This novel is set in a then-future 2004. There is still a (theoretical) Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. At the elite governmental level, however, both "sides" have secretly come to an agreement. They have decided that, instead of continuing the ecologically and economically crippling nuclear and conventional arms race, they will pretend to be constantly developing new weapons, which are then "plowshared." This means that these items are transformed into novel but baroque consumer products. Most of these weapon designers are mediums, who create their new designs in trance states. Design of weapons are extracted telepathically from a motion comic book, The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan, created by mad Italian artist Oral Giacomini.