7 ms·

My encounter with Medley Interlisp

114 points by mepian 4y ago

jshaqaw 4y ago
A Lisp Machine in my browser?!?! And just like that my coming week of productivity was lost. Awesome!
neilv 4y ago
> Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship. This is the opportunity Medley Interlisp offers. This is rare and great.
la4ry 4y ago
small correction: Medley online.interisp.org doesn't run IN the browser -- it's running on a Linux-based Docker container with AWS. You can also install it on your linux, macos, windows (with WSL or ...) and other computer/os interfaces.
- treve 4y ago
  Wow you're right. It uses some kind of browser-based VNC client. Would love to learn a bit more about the general components to make this work.
  - pamoroso 4y ago
    See the Online Medley repo https://github.com/Interlisp/online https://github.com/Interlisp/online
gumby 4y ago
Many people who read about Lisp Machines are not aware that the InterLisp-D world and the MIT world (CADR, LMI, Symbolics etc) had significantly different approaches to how the systems should work, so even if you have read or used the MIT-style systems you will learn a lot by using Medley. I came from MIT out to PARC for a year, and later moved CYC from D machines to Symbolics machines (a complete reimplementation using a different fundamental architecture) so have good experiences with them both. At heart, the InterLisp language itself isn't that different from MIT lisps, as Interlisp started down the road at BBN and there was a lot of cross fertilization in both directions. And CommonLisp, while heavily based on the "MIT" model has a lot of Interlisp influence in it. But as far as the interfaces are concerned things are quite different. Writing code on an "MIT-style" machine was like writing it on the '10: type into an emacs and away you go. Interlisp-D's conception was heavily influenced by the SmallTalk experience: structured rather than text editing, mouse as a primary interface tool, and development based on images rather than files of code. It was much more intensely networked even than most computing today. Although I ultimately still preferred the MIT model, I learned a lot from Interlisp and there are many things I preferred in that environment. The most annoying part for me was the dependence on the mouse. A nit: > "The learning curve of such a complex system is steep, almost vertical." This means you could effectively learn everything overnight. A shallow learning curve is the terrible one: takes a long time to learn.
- HexDecOctBin 4y ago
  In common parlance, a learning curve is plotting effort/output, not output/effort. So vertical means nigh infinite effort to achieve small change in output. I also don't like this convention, since it flips dependent-independent variable dichotomy on its head, but it seems to be the widely accepted norm now.
  - gumby 4y ago
    People adopting specific jargon (random, cloud, quantum) without understanding in order to try to pretend to belong. Sigh. Humans are complex. Worst example to me is the common use of the “ugly American” — in the book, he was the good guy who got out there and got dirty, as opposed to the pampered ones who stayed in the green zone, didn’t know any locals, and assumed everything in whatever country they were in was the same as in the ol’ USA, but just broken or corrupt. I’m not American but I always cringe when I hear this usage. Why do people have to hollow out metaphors, destroying language in the process?
    - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
      Try climbing. I've done a tiny bit. It's hard going straight up as opposed to a nicely sloped walkable path. Takes a lot of effort. Metaphor WFM anyway.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on the 'much more intensely networked' bit please.
  - gumby 4y ago
    I replied to a comment by lispm which was a parallel comment to yours. Interested in your thoughts.
- pamoroso 4y ago
  I'm the author of the linked post, thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious what you preferred of the Interlisp environment over the MIT world.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I had a Xerox 1108 running Medley Interlisp (until I updated it to Common Lisp). Great memories, but I just can't get the same level of excitement running it on my MacBook in emulation mode. That said I 1000% appreciate the work that Larry and other people are doing to maintain it because it is my personal history. I write a lot about Lisp languages (and I offer free mentoring, and people often ask for Lisp advice) and for most people I actually recommend Racket Scheme as an introduction since it is a batteries included instant install on most platforms and the supplied IDE is pretty good. If anyone gets really interested in using Lisp, the big job is deciding which language and implementation to use. I love Common Lisp (LispWorks, SBCL+Emacs), Scheme (Gerbil, Chez, Gambit), and Haskell (which for some weird reason I think of as a Lisp language). Sadly, I have none of my old Medley Interlisp code that I did in the early 1980s (I searched my old paperwork looking for program listings - no luck). I thought of writing up a short 50 page "tutorial and fun projects" book on Medley Interlisp, but the idea of starting over from scratch is daunting.
- pamoroso 4y ago
  I wrote the linked post, I'm glad it brought up some good memories. I'd definitely buy your book.
- mikelevins 4y ago
  I was in Weird Stuff Warehouse in Santa Clara in about 1990 and they had three fully kitted-out 1108s sitting on the floor for about $600 each, with software and manuals and so forth. I went home to deal with something or other, intending to come back and get one, but by the time I returned they were gone. They never had one again when I was there.
dang 4y ago
Related: 2022 Medley Interlisp Annual Report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100600 - Dec 2022 (11 comments) Interlisp Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621183 - Aug 2022 (9 comments) Larry Masinter, the Medley Interlisp Project: Status and Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379238 - Dec 2020 (2 comments) Interlisp project: Restore Interlisp-D to usability on modern OSes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24075216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24075216 - Aug 2020 (24 comments) The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328 - June 2013 (10 comments) The Interlisp Programming Environment -- nice paper for those building tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889468 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
dang 4y ago
Old product homepages: https://web.archive.org/web/20000523141258/http://www.top2bottom.net/venue.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000523141258/http://www.top2bo... https://web.archive.org/web/20000115225954/http://top2bottom.net/medley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000115225954/http://top2bottom...
DonHopkins 4y ago
Warren Teitelman wrote about the history of Interlisp-D and other window systems in 1985, in the chapter "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View" of the book "Methodology of Window Management" (the volume is a record of the Workshop on Window Management held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Cosener's House between 29 April and 1 May 1985). Warren was the manager of Sun's Multimedia Group in which I worked on NeWS, and his contributions to programming environments and user interface design at Xerox PARC were important and underrated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman >Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including Undo / Redo,[5] spelling correction, advising, online help, and DWIM (Do What I Mean). Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by Warren Teitelman: http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p004.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... >4.1 INTRODUCTION >Both James Gosling and I currently work for SUN and the reason for my wanting to talk before he does is that I am talking about the past and James is talking about the future. I have been connected with eight window systems as a user, or as an implementer, or by being in the same building! I have been asked to give a historical view and my talk looks at window systems over ten years and features: the Smalltalk, DLisp (Interlisp), Interlisp-D, Tajo (Mesa Development Environment), Docs (Cedar), Viewers (Cedar), SunWindows and SunDew systems. >The talk focuses on key ideas, where they came from, how they are connected and how they evolved. Firstly, I make the disclaimer that these are my personal recollections and there are bound to be some mistakes although I did spend some time talking to people on the telephone about when things did happen. >The first system of interest is Smalltalk from Xerox PARC. Alan Kay commented in email on that paper and Warren's under-appreciated work: >Windows didn’t start with Smalltalk. The first real windowing system I know of was ca 1962, in Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (as with so many other firsts). The logical “paper” was about 1/3 mile on a side and the system clipped, zoomed, and panned in real time. Almost the same year — and using much of the same code — “Sketchpad III” had 4 windows showing front, side, top, and 3D view of the object being made. These two systems set up the way of thinking about windows in the ARPA research community. One of the big goals from the start was to include the ability to do multiple views of the same objects, and to edit them from any view, etc. >When Ivan went ca 1967 to Harvard to start on the first VR system, he and Bob Sproull wrote a paper about the general uses of windows for most things, including 3D. This paper included Danny Cohen’s “mid-point algorithm” for fast clipping of vectors. The scheme in the paper had much of what later was called “Models-Views-and-Controllers” in my group at Parc. A view in the Sutherland-Sproull scheme had two ends (like a telescope). One end looked at the virtual world, and the other end was mapped to the screen. It is fun to note that the rectangle on the screen was called a “viewport” and the other end in the virtual world was called “the window”. (This got changed at Parc, via some confusions demoing to Xerox execs). >In 1967, Ed Cheadle and I were doing “The Flex Machine”, a desktop personal computer that also had multiple windows (and Cheadle independently developed the mid-point algorithm for this) — our viewing scheme was a bit simpler. >The first few paragraphs of Teitelman’s “history” are quite wrong (however, he was a good guy, and never got the recognition he deserved for the PILOT system he did at MIT with many of these ideas winding up in Interlisp). David Rosenthal (who worked on Andrew, NeWS, X10, X11, and ICCCM) replied: Alan, thank you for these important details. I’d like to write a blog post correcting my view of this history — may I quote your e-mail? Is this paper, “A Clipping Divider”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 The one you refer to? David. Alan Kay replied: Hi David Thanks very much! Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today. I would like to encourage you to expand it a bit more (even though you do give quite a few references). I had very high hopes for Sun. After Parc, I wanted something better than Smalltalk, and thought Sun had a good chance to do the “next great thing” in all of these directions. And I think a number of real advances were made despite the “low-pass filters” and exigencies of business. So please do write some more. Cheers and best wishes to all Alan Don Hopkins replied: Yeah, it was very sad that Sun ended up in Larry Ellison’s grubby hands. And I sure liked the Sun logo designed by Vaughan Pratt and tilted 45 degrees by John Gage (almost as great as Scott Kim’s design of the SGI logo), which he just sent out to the garbage dump. (At least Facebook kept the Sun logo on the back of their sign as a warning to their developers.) I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music, reliving their glory days on the trade show floors and promotional videos. It would make a great screen saver, at least! -Don David Rosenthal posted on his blog: History of Window Systems https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html >Alan Kay's Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers? makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I've wrtten about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail. I archived a discussion that started with Alan's reply to the question "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?": Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”

114 points by mepian 4y ago

A Lisp Machine in my browser?!?! And just like that my coming week of productivity was lost. Awesome!

> Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship. This is the opportunity Medley Interlisp offers. This is rare and great.

la4ry 4y ago

small correction: Medley online.interisp.org doesn't run IN the browser -- it's running on a Linux-based Docker container with AWS. You can also install it on your linux, macos, windows (with WSL or ...) and other computer/os interfaces.

treve 4y ago
Wow you're right. It uses some kind of browser-based VNC client. Would love to learn a bit more about the general components to make this work.
- pamoroso 4y ago
  See the Online Medley repo https://github.com/Interlisp/online https://github.com/Interlisp/online

gumby 4y ago

Many people who read about Lisp Machines are not aware that the InterLisp-D world and the MIT world (CADR, LMI, Symbolics etc) had significantly different approaches to how the systems should work, so even if you have read or used the MIT-style systems you will learn a lot by using Medley. I came from MIT out to PARC for a year, and later moved CYC from D machines to Symbolics machines (a complete reimplementation using a different fundamental architecture) so have good experiences with them both. At heart, the InterLisp language itself isn't that different from MIT lisps, as Interlisp started down the road at BBN and there was a lot of cross fertilization in both directions. And CommonLisp, while heavily based on the "MIT" model has a lot of Interlisp influence in it. But as far as the interfaces are concerned things are quite different. Writing code on an "MIT-style" machine was like writing it on the '10: type into an emacs and away you go. Interlisp-D's conception was heavily influenced by the SmallTalk experience: structured rather than text editing, mouse as a primary interface tool, and development based on images rather than files of code. It was much more intensely networked even than most computing today. Although I ultimately still preferred the MIT model, I learned a lot from Interlisp and there are many things I preferred in that environment. The most annoying part for me was the dependence on the mouse. A nit: > "The learning curve of such a complex system is steep, almost vertical." This means you could effectively learn everything overnight. A shallow learning curve is the terrible one: takes a long time to learn.

HexDecOctBin 4y ago
In common parlance, a learning curve is plotting effort/output, not output/effort. So vertical means nigh infinite effort to achieve small change in output. I also don't like this convention, since it flips dependent-independent variable dichotomy on its head, but it seems to be the widely accepted norm now.
- gumby 4y ago
  People adopting specific jargon (random, cloud, quantum) without understanding in order to try to pretend to belong. Sigh. Humans are complex. Worst example to me is the common use of the “ugly American” — in the book, he was the good guy who got out there and got dirty, as opposed to the pampered ones who stayed in the green zone, didn’t know any locals, and assumed everything in whatever country they were in was the same as in the ol’ USA, but just broken or corrupt. I’m not American but I always cringe when I hear this usage. Why do people have to hollow out metaphors, destroying language in the process?
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    Try climbing. I've done a tiny bit. It's hard going straight up as opposed to a nicely sloped walkable path. Takes a lot of effort. Metaphor WFM anyway.
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Could you elaborate on the 'much more intensely networked' bit please.
- gumby 4y ago
  I replied to a comment by lispm which was a parallel comment to yours. Interested in your thoughts.
pamoroso 4y ago
I'm the author of the linked post, thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious what you preferred of the Interlisp environment over the MIT world.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I had a Xerox 1108 running Medley Interlisp (until I updated it to Common Lisp). Great memories, but I just can't get the same level of excitement running it on my MacBook in emulation mode. That said I 1000% appreciate the work that Larry and other people are doing to maintain it because it is my personal history. I write a lot about Lisp languages (and I offer free mentoring, and people often ask for Lisp advice) and for most people I actually recommend Racket Scheme as an introduction since it is a batteries included instant install on most platforms and the supplied IDE is pretty good. If anyone gets really interested in using Lisp, the big job is deciding which language and implementation to use. I love Common Lisp (LispWorks, SBCL+Emacs), Scheme (Gerbil, Chez, Gambit), and Haskell (which for some weird reason I think of as a Lisp language). Sadly, I have none of my old Medley Interlisp code that I did in the early 1980s (I searched my old paperwork looking for program listings - no luck). I thought of writing up a short 50 page "tutorial and fun projects" book on Medley Interlisp, but the idea of starting over from scratch is daunting.

pamoroso 4y ago
I wrote the linked post, I'm glad it brought up some good memories. I'd definitely buy your book.
mikelevins 4y ago
I was in Weird Stuff Warehouse in Santa Clara in about 1990 and they had three fully kitted-out 1108s sitting on the floor for about $600 each, with software and manuals and so forth. I went home to deal with something or other, intending to come back and get one, but by the time I returned they were gone. They never had one again when I was there.

dang 4y ago

Related: 2022 Medley Interlisp Annual Report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100600 - Dec 2022 (11 comments) Interlisp Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621183 - Aug 2022 (9 comments) Larry Masinter, the Medley Interlisp Project: Status and Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379238 - Dec 2020 (2 comments) Interlisp project: Restore Interlisp-D to usability on modern OSes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24075216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24075216 - Aug 2020 (24 comments) The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328 - June 2013 (10 comments) The Interlisp Programming Environment -- nice paper for those building tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889468 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)

dang 4y ago

Old product homepages: https://web.archive.org/web/20000523141258/http://www.top2bottom.net/venue.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000523141258/http://www.top2bo... https://web.archive.org/web/20000115225954/http://top2bottom.net/medley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000115225954/http://top2bottom...

DonHopkins 4y ago

Warren Teitelman wrote about the history of Interlisp-D and other window systems in 1985, in the chapter "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View" of the book "Methodology of Window Management" (the volume is a record of the Workshop on Window Management held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Cosener's House between 29 April and 1 May 1985). Warren was the manager of Sun's Multimedia Group in which I worked on NeWS, and his contributions to programming environments and user interface design at Xerox PARC were important and underrated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman >Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including Undo / Redo,[5] spelling correction, advising, online help, and DWIM (Do What I Mean). Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by Warren Teitelman: http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p004.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... >4.1 INTRODUCTION >Both James Gosling and I currently work for SUN and the reason for my wanting to talk before he does is that I am talking about the past and James is talking about the future. I have been connected with eight window systems as a user, or as an implementer, or by being in the same building! I have been asked to give a historical view and my talk looks at window systems over ten years and features: the Smalltalk, DLisp (Interlisp), Interlisp-D, Tajo (Mesa Development Environment), Docs (Cedar), Viewers (Cedar), SunWindows and SunDew systems. >The talk focuses on key ideas, where they came from, how they are connected and how they evolved. Firstly, I make the disclaimer that these are my personal recollections and there are bound to be some mistakes although I did spend some time talking to people on the telephone about when things did happen. >The first system of interest is Smalltalk from Xerox PARC. Alan Kay commented in email on that paper and Warren's under-appreciated work: >Windows didn’t start with Smalltalk. The first real windowing system I know of was ca 1962, in Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (as with so many other firsts). The logical “paper” was about 1/3 mile on a side and the system clipped, zoomed, and panned in real time. Almost the same year — and using much of the same code — “Sketchpad III” had 4 windows showing front, side, top, and 3D view of the object being made. These two systems set up the way of thinking about windows in the ARPA research community. One of the big goals from the start was to include the ability to do multiple views of the same objects, and to edit them from any view, etc. >When Ivan went ca 1967 to Harvard to start on the first VR system, he and Bob Sproull wrote a paper about the general uses of windows for most things, including 3D. This paper included Danny Cohen’s “mid-point algorithm” for fast clipping of vectors. The scheme in the paper had much of what later was called “Models-Views-and-Controllers” in my group at Parc. A view in the Sutherland-Sproull scheme had two ends (like a telescope). One end looked at the virtual world, and the other end was mapped to the screen. It is fun to note that the rectangle on the screen was called a “viewport” and the other end in the virtual world was called “the window”. (This got changed at Parc, via some confusions demoing to Xerox execs). >In 1967, Ed Cheadle and I were doing “The Flex Machine”, a desktop personal computer that also had multiple windows (and Cheadle independently developed the mid-point algorithm for this) — our viewing scheme was a bit simpler. >The first few paragraphs of Teitelman’s “history” are quite wrong (however, he was a good guy, and never got the recognition he deserved for the PILOT system he did at MIT with many of these ideas winding up in Interlisp). David Rosenthal (who worked on Andrew, NeWS, X10, X11, and ICCCM) replied: Alan, thank you for these important details. I’d like to write a blog post correcting my view of this history — may I quote your e-mail? Is this paper, “A Clipping Divider”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 The one you refer to? David. Alan Kay replied: Hi David Thanks very much! Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today. I would like to encourage you to expand it a bit more (even though you do give quite a few references). I had very high hopes for Sun. After Parc, I wanted something better than Smalltalk, and thought Sun had a good chance to do the “next great thing” in all of these directions. And I think a number of real advances were made despite the “low-pass filters” and exigencies of business. So please do write some more. Cheers and best wishes to all Alan Don Hopkins replied: Yeah, it was very sad that Sun ended up in Larry Ellison’s grubby hands. And I sure liked the Sun logo designed by Vaughan Pratt and tilted 45 degrees by John Gage (almost as great as Scott Kim’s design of the SGI logo), which he just sent out to the garbage dump. (At least Facebook kept the Sun logo on the back of their sign as a warning to their developers.) I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music, reliving their glory days on the trade show floors and promotional videos. It would make a great screen saver, at least! -Don David Rosenthal posted on his blog: History of Window Systems https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html >Alan Kay's Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers? makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I've wrtten about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail. I archived a discussion that started with Alan's reply to the question "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?": Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”