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Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens. Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would have a black&white console and a col
by lispm 5y ago
Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens. Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would have a black&white console and a color screen. The color screen would be driven by a color graphics card, possibly a FrameThrower - which is an accelerated graphics card.
The graphics editor seen is just the S-Paint part of S-Graphics - it could use a FrameThrower, but also other graphics cards. There was also S-Paint on the MacIvory running in a Macintosh. S-Graphics also ran on earlier Lisp Machines from Symbolics, like a 3670 from 1984.
A bunch of TV studios, video production companies, animation studios and game developers were customers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 from 6:09 shows the using such a Paint system on a Symbolics.
The software it runs is S-Graphics, which was later ported to SGIs and Windows machines as N-World, by Nichimen (then using Allegro CL from Franz Inc.).
- eddieh 5y agoI had no idea these machines existed. When tasked with writing a ray tracer way back in college, the first thing I did was create a scene description format based on S-expressions. Yesterday I was nostalgically looking at backups of the assignment and found my first scene file: (camera 0 0 -20) ; red sphere (sphere 0 1 50 5 (material (color 255 127 127) 0.8 0.8)) ; green sphere (sphere -20 1 200 9 (material (color 127 255 127) 0.8 0.8)) (plane 0 1 0 20 (material (color 127 127 255) 0.8 0.8)) I went so far as to make the scenes scriptable with Guile. I had another scene that procedurally generated spheres positioned about a helix, but that seems to be lost to the bit gods. To me, there's something very natural about using S-expressions to create graphics. I wish there was a video (with a high enough resolution) that shows the Lisp interactions—especially in the subdivision modeler.
- miltondts 5y agoThe more I look at software from the 80-90s, even the 60s the more it seems it has barely moved in terms of capabilities.