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Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013

Kalman Reti · 52K views · 2013-08-18 · 13:43

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Overview

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

On Hacker News

The go-to demo whenever HN discusses what Lisp machines were like and what modern shells and editors lack.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2014–2024

Topics

History of computingFunctional programmingGUI, HCI & interface history
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symbolicsgeneralispreploperating systemsuser interfaces

What people said

hcarvalhoalves · 2024-10 · Strong recommendation

See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: [VIDEO] [LINK] It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.

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yourapostasy · 2023-10 · Recommendation

>My dream is to make everything visualizable at runtime. Check out demos of the old Lisp Machines, [1] is a brief overview demo, [2] links to a timestamp with a view of some simple diagramming, but I’ve seen TI-Symbolics beasts routinely display complex relationships in Lisp code on their massive (for the time) bitmapped screens. The limitation was the end user managing the visualization complexity. With open source llvm, clang and similar making available abstract syntax trees and even semantic analysis and type checking results, LLM’s assisting with decompiling binary blobs, and modern hardware (goggles, graphics cards, and so on), I sometimes wonder how close we can come to reproducing that aspect of the Lisp Machine experience on open source operating systems. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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rml · 2021-04 · Recommendation

If you are into Lisp Machines, this talk on Symbolics by Kalman Reti (who worked there) is worth watching (1h): [LINK] If you only have 15 minutes, he gives another demo here: [VIDEO] He has another video where he does some actual hacking (smooth scrolling of sheet music for display while playing an instrument): [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Kalman Reti, played through YouTube.

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