This is wild:
> Portable Genera, an official port of the VLM to Intel and ARM done under contract for existing customers. While this version isn't publicly available as of this writing, it's still actively developed.
So many mysteries: which customers, and which customers with the capacity to pay not only for an ongoing service contract but a port? Some unknown wealthy benefactor? Someone managing 30 year-old ICBMs?
Obviously we now know what OpenAI is really running on.
I wish these weren't so unobtanium... I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines, and as part of that I'd like to spend time hands-on with the real hardware, but it's hard and expensive to find the damn things.
I know someone in the US with Symbolics hardware (actual Lisp machines and MacIvory) as well as TI MicroExplorer for quiet sale. Email is in profile.
The Open Genera version for the Alpha is a lot easier to obtain. There's also a bootleg version that ported the Alpha assembly to C. It apparently run on Linux x64 at some point. IIRC, it depends on some removed X11 features, so it may be difficult to run on a current OS.
Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Museum in Seattle back in 2019, I saw that there were no Lisp machines available, though I did get to see and use other rare machines such as the Xerox Alto, the Apple Lisa, and the original NeXT cube (I'm glad I finally got to add one to my collection a few years ago). MIT CADR has been made open source for quite some time (https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/), and I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D is now open source (https://interlisp.org/). However, the holy grail of Lisp machine environments, Symbolics Genera, is still not available as FOSS. Funnily enough, this is fitting since Richard Stallman's frustrations with Symbolics was one of the catalysts behind his starting the GNU Project.
One of the interesting "what could have been" moments of computing history is Apple's exploration of Lisp in the late 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s. Such projects include:
- Apple's original plans for the Newton, which included an OS written in Lisp.
- The Dylan programming language, which I've heard can be thought of as Scheme with the Common Lisp Object System. Dylan was originally designed to be the official language used to develop Newton apps. Originally Dylan had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. However, the Newton ended up using a C++-based operating system, and NewtonScript, which wasn't based on a Lisp, was created as the language for developing Newton apps.
- SK8 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) ), which was dubbed "HyperCard on steroids," was written in Common Lisp.
In an alternate timeline, we could've been using Apple devices built on a Lisp foundation. This is probably the closest we've gotten to Lisp machines on the desktop, as opposed to specialized AI workstations that cost five figures in 1980s dollars.
Then again, things worked out well for Apple after the NeXT purchase. The OpenStep API (which became Cocoa) and Objective-C was (and still is) solid infrastructure than can be thought of as a "pragmatic Smalltalk" desktop, though in recent years I feel Apple has been moving on from NeXT influences and is doing its own thing now with Swift.
> had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt.
They can be forgiven, at the time. Now we have evidence that thinking is wrong. Today we have half of everyone and their dog, as Web programmers, using a syntax originally chosen by very technical systems programmers. (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)
Almost no Web developers are systems programmers, and this is just a poor syntax for the work, and needlessly cryptic, but they can pick up even this bad syntax just fine.
Now we know that, whether you use curly braces, parentheses, whitespace, or something else is not the barrier to learning a programming language. It's one of the most absolutely trivial things about it to learn.
Knowing this, the next time I hear someone say "We can't use this syntax, because it will just totally break people's brains, even though the higher grammar, semantics, libraries, domain frameworks, and everything else are different anyway, and are orders of magnitude harder to learn, we need to make it look superficially like something it's not, because people are full of poo"... I'm ready to appropriate the Lily Allen song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube had a video with a guy calling himself tr0n(?) showing off his Symbolics machine. I can't find the video, but it's out there and it's good.
Here's that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY8ACu24nGs
I have one of these! I will read this article closely for guidance.