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Those amazing Lisp machines were far ahead of their time. Unfortunately the hardware was very expensive, and it lacked power. Today we have the right cheap hard
by progman 9y ago
Those amazing Lisp machines were far ahead of their time. Unfortunately the hardware was very expensive, and it lacked power. Today we have the right cheap hardware. Actually, there is a Lisp revival going on in the OSS community. Consider McClim [1] for instance which attempts to port the amazing GUI of the Lisp Machines to PCs. It already works.
[1] https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/
- erikj 9y agoMcClim existed for decades and it's still struggling to become production-ready, a poor example of the "revival".
- progman 9y ago> it's still struggling to become production-ready McClim is not a business case. It is just a project to revive the most sophisticated GUI for Lisp. The graphical shell [1] for instance which already works gives a remarkable impression. [1] https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screenshots/listener1.jpg https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screensh...
- jcelerier 9y agoTruly amazing. https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screenshots/2eL0LhQ.png https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screensh...
- lispm 9y agoAt that time the machine didn't lack power. There was nothing similar. Large disks, large virtual memory, a 68k processor for driving the frontend IO, large bitmap screen, 10+ bus slots, tape drive, ethernet, ... all for a single user. It's hard to imagine, but 10MB RAM were amazingly expensive in the early 80s. Similar for harddisks with 100MB... On a timeshared VAX 10-100 people had to share this amount of RAM...