10 ms·

Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines

62 points by akheron 16y ago

unwind 16y ago
Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces were like, this certainly piqued my interest. However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.
- lispm 16y ago
  Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.
  - kez 16y ago
    I think you might be underestimating the click-happy masses (myself included) who will happily pump the middle mouse button to queue up some even potentially interesting reads!
  - dexen 16y ago
    A quick workaround would be linking via Coral Cache: http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples.html http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbo... (note the .nyud.net bit in hostname) But it won't work right now, as CC can't connect to your server at all... Edit: more info on http://coralcdn.org/ http://coralcdn.org/
  - Natsu 16y ago
    You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not.... Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.' bit at the bottom.
    - gwern 16y ago
      You are suggesting that he give screenshots of copyrighted software a CC license? ....Right.
      - gnok 16y ago
        How is that different from say, a CC licensed photograph of a car or an iPhone?
        gwern 16y ago
        I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better than this. --- A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them are. Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book? Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An amazing discovery!) Tell me, do you and all your upvoters think you know better than Wikimedia Commons when it writes (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots) : > Screenshots are subject to the copyright of the displayed work, may it be a video, television program, or a computer program. Do you think you know better than the librarian who wrote http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/copyrightalexmorrisson.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jiscleg... ? Or how about http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 or http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing-screenshots-fair-use http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing... or any of a dozen links you could have found in seconds googling 'copyright screenshot'? Notice the only question is whether fair use will defend you when you infringe on copyright by making screenshots and not whether screenshots are copyrighted at all, because they are copyrighted. Do you, in fact, have the slightest argument besides a specious analogy?
  - yinhm 16y ago
    Now, it's down.
  - tdoggette 16y ago
    The thing is, if these screenshots are interesting, they'll spread from HN to blogs to the programming subreddit, and your iMac will just keep failing. Even just an archive of these uploaded somewhere with a server would make them accessible.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  One day, when I finally learn VHDL, I'll make a compact Symbolics-compatible Lisp Machine. I have already done some research on what would be needed to build USB Symbolics/Space Cadet keyboards... Unfortunately, I doubt a keyboard without arrow keys would be very popular beyond a small group.
  - lispm 16y ago
    You can build keyboards with arrow keys. IIRC the keyboards from TI for their Explorer Lisp Machines had arrows, etc. Even with Genera you can use arrow keys. You can configure a new keyboard layout and use that for your keyboard. Genera can for example be used over X11 or on the MacIvory. There keyboards typically have arrows and Genera knows about them...
swombat 16y ago
Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection, perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Kototama 16y ago
  There is this at the end of the page: Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.
- brlewis 16y ago
  There's even mine written primarily in Scheme, apropos to these images: http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/
aristidb 16y ago
Even people with the most superficial interest in Lisp will love to see screenshots, especially if they are described as awesome. If they can.
cpr 16y ago
Boy, that brought back happy memories! I was running the MIT-EECS department computing machinery back when Symbolics and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc--Greenblatt's competitor) were just getting going, and we had around 8 or 10 of the original LispMs for undergrads to use, wire-wrapped and all. Even those, as slow as they were, were impressive machines for the time, given the 'turtles all the way' down architecture. (Everything written in Lisp, except the microcode.) Back then, we were using MIT's CHAOSnet, a home-grown competitor to PARC's original 3Mb Ethernet. Unhappy memories of big fat yellow coax everywhere, easily dented. We used a TDR a lot to find kinks in the cable when the network wasn't working well. The LispMs were years ahead of their time in terms of sheer architectural genius, but were also incredibly baroque--many brilliant hackers adding ornament upon ornament for years...
mrbill 16y ago
I recently bought a MacIvory II board set with docs and install media and am awaiting the arrival of parts for the Quadra 700 that I'm going to host it in. I've got a Symbolics "fat" old-style keyboard that I'm going to make the USB adapter for, and then use that to run Genera over X on the LAN.
- lispm 16y ago
  That works, but you should keep your MacIvory at arms length. The debugger will often pop up on the main console and not the X11 window Console.
davidcollantes 16y ago
You are certainly redefining "awesome" on this quasi-sensationalist submission. Please host the screenshots somewhere decent (not on your home machine) and use a proper title ("UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics List Machines" should suffice). I want to keep believing HN != Digg.
- ptomato 16y ago
  Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.
smartrevolution 16y ago
Rainer Joswig (the guy who hosts the screenshots) did live demos with his machines at the "5. Hamburg Lispers Meeting" in 2008 at my company's office. Here are some photos of the machines and the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397... The SLIME REPL is very much modeled after the Symbolics REPL. I guess Rainer can tell more about that. Check out the videos on his main site (sorry Rainer, this may increase traffic again. :) ). The most amazing part of his demo for me was, when he inspected a running Lisp process, changed the code and continued from there. The OS is (almost) completely written in Lisp, too...
lispm 16y ago
The link to the screenshots has been posted several times before. This time I see a lot of requests for the screenshots coming in and it still goes on after three days. Any idea what is causing this?

62 points by akheron 16y ago

Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces were like, this certainly piqued my interest. However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.

lispm 16y ago
Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.
- kez 16y ago
  I think you might be underestimating the click-happy masses (myself included) who will happily pump the middle mouse button to queue up some even potentially interesting reads!
- dexen 16y ago
  A quick workaround would be linking via Coral Cache: http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples.html http://lispm.dyndns.org.nyud.net/symbolics-ui-examples/symbo... (note the .nyud.net bit in hostname) But it won't work right now, as CC can't connect to your server at all... Edit: more info on http://coralcdn.org/ http://coralcdn.org/
- Natsu 16y ago
  You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not.... Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.' bit at the bottom.
  - gwern 16y ago
    You are suggesting that he give screenshots of copyrighted software a CC license? ....Right.
    - gnok 16y ago
      How is that different from say, a CC licensed photograph of a car or an iPhone?
      - gwern 16y ago
        I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better than this. --- A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them are. Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book? Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An amazing discovery!) Tell me, do you and all your upvoters think you know better than Wikimedia Commons when it writes (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots) : > Screenshots are subject to the copyright of the displayed work, may it be a video, television program, or a computer program. Do you think you know better than the librarian who wrote http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/copyrightalexmorrisson.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jiscleg... ? Or how about http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 or http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing-screenshots-fair-use http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing... or any of a dozen links you could have found in seconds googling 'copyright screenshot'? Notice the only question is whether fair use will defend you when you infringe on copyright by making screenshots and not whether screenshots are copyrighted at all, because they are copyrighted. Do you, in fact, have the slightest argument besides a specious analogy?
- yinhm 16y ago
  Now, it's down.
- tdoggette 16y ago
  The thing is, if these screenshots are interesting, they'll spread from HN to blogs to the programming subreddit, and your iMac will just keep failing. Even just an archive of these uploaded somewhere with a server would make them accessible.
rbanffy 16y ago
One day, when I finally learn VHDL, I'll make a compact Symbolics-compatible Lisp Machine. I have already done some research on what would be needed to build USB Symbolics/Space Cadet keyboards... Unfortunately, I doubt a keyboard without arrow keys would be very popular beyond a small group.
- lispm 16y ago
  You can build keyboards with arrow keys. IIRC the keyboards from TI for their Explorer Lisp Machines had arrows, etc. Even with Genera you can use arrow keys. You can configure a new keyboard layout and use that for your keyboard. Genera can for example be used over X11 or on the MacIvory. There keyboards typically have arrows and Genera knows about them...

swombat 16y ago

Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection, perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Kototama 16y ago
There is this at the end of the page: Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.
brlewis 16y ago
There's even mine written primarily in Scheme, apropos to these images: http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/

aristidb 16y ago

Even people with the most superficial interest in Lisp will love to see screenshots, especially if they are described as awesome. If they can.

cpr 16y ago

Boy, that brought back happy memories! I was running the MIT-EECS department computing machinery back when Symbolics and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc--Greenblatt's competitor) were just getting going, and we had around 8 or 10 of the original LispMs for undergrads to use, wire-wrapped and all. Even those, as slow as they were, were impressive machines for the time, given the 'turtles all the way' down architecture. (Everything written in Lisp, except the microcode.) Back then, we were using MIT's CHAOSnet, a home-grown competitor to PARC's original 3Mb Ethernet. Unhappy memories of big fat yellow coax everywhere, easily dented. We used a TDR a lot to find kinks in the cable when the network wasn't working well. The LispMs were years ahead of their time in terms of sheer architectural genius, but were also incredibly baroque--many brilliant hackers adding ornament upon ornament for years...

mrbill 16y ago

I recently bought a MacIvory II board set with docs and install media and am awaiting the arrival of parts for the Quadra 700 that I'm going to host it in. I've got a Symbolics "fat" old-style keyboard that I'm going to make the USB adapter for, and then use that to run Genera over X on the LAN.

lispm 16y ago
That works, but you should keep your MacIvory at arms length. The debugger will often pop up on the main console and not the X11 window Console.

davidcollantes 16y ago

You are certainly redefining "awesome" on this quasi-sensationalist submission. Please host the screenshots somewhere decent (not on your home machine) and use a proper title ("UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics List Machines" should suffice). I want to keep believing HN != Digg.

ptomato 16y ago
Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.

smartrevolution 16y ago

Rainer Joswig (the guy who hosts the screenshots) did live demos with his machines at the "5. Hamburg Lispers Meeting" in 2008 at my company's office. Here are some photos of the machines and the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397... The SLIME REPL is very much modeled after the Symbolics REPL. I guess Rainer can tell more about that. Check out the videos on his main site (sorry Rainer, this may increase traffic again. :) ). The most amazing part of his demo for me was, when he inspected a running Lisp process, changed the code and continued from there. The OS is (almost) completely written in Lisp, too...

lispm 16y ago

The link to the screenshots has been posted several times before. This time I see a lot of requests for the screenshots coming in and it still goes on after three days. Any idea what is causing this?