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Leaving the specific idea of the Lisp Machine aside, today there we have a tremendous advantage over the past when it comes to creating the kind of full, self-c
by scroot 5y ago
Leaving the specific idea of the Lisp Machine aside, today there we have a tremendous advantage over the past when it comes to creating the kind of full, self-consistent systems Lisp Machines -- and systems like Smalltalk or Oberon, etc -- represent. Today we have widely accepted communications and data format standards. This is something that really isolated system diversity in the past, where you were "stuck" in some given computing system and had little ways of interacting with other types of computing systems. We have figured all of that out.
We should hope to see a flourishing of new and diverse systems again, since now all one need to do to interact with everyone else is merely (and I know it's a slog) implement tried and true standards.
- lispm 5y agoOne can implement these standards. Problem: it's work. They supported things like TCP/IP, UDP, SMTP, X11, RPC, NFS, DNS, HTTP, ... The machines had C compilers, too.
- scroot 5y agoSome of these new systems should definitely be lisp machines of a kind, though not direct clones of Genera. We need something more "of the times." In reality, there are only a few things people expect of their computing systems, but those things are huge: decent graphics and components for the UI, and a web browser. So, yeah, standards and protocols are there. And it would take a s*t-ton of work to implement them in a bespoke environment. But they are not "difficult" in the classic sense. If we had a completely different type of economy it might even be possible!