8 ms·

Symbolics Lisp Machines Graphics Demo (1990) [video]

148 points by mepian 3y ago

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
I really don't understand how this company fell so far from grace. Their product was excellent. Don't get me wrong, I've read the history and understood how they failed to pivot from hardware Lisp machines, but they have completely vanished without even chugging along as a legacy systems provider (think OS/2). Does any of their influence survive in modern hardware or software design? I hardly ever see Genera cited.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  I believe there is still a minimal group of people providing support to some legacy customers. From what I've heard they have an emulator that originally ran on Alpha but was recently ported to x86 and then to Apple Silicon ( https://twitter.com/gmpalter/status/1350663314968350723?s=20 https://twitter.com/gmpalter/status/1350663314968350723?s=20 ). IP issues I think are sort of unclear and so the legal release of the software is tricky, if not impossible.
  - mepian 3y ago
    The intellectual property of Symbolics is currently owned by John C. Mallery, the developer of CL-HTTP aka the first US White House web server. He was interested in making it officially free, but unfortunately has gone silent about two years ago, according to the person who ported Genera to x86 and Apple Silicon: https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553414024392523 https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553414024392523
    - eschaton 3y ago
      If he acquired it from Topping’s estate, I’d like to see proof that Toppings actually paid for it.
    - gumby 3y ago
      I talk to him from time to time so he isn’t silent on every topic.
      - mepian 3y ago
        Could you please try to probe him on this topic?
- convolvatron 3y ago
  They were really expensive. Many of their customers were first wave AI shop, so when they shut down that was alot of revenue. I think sgi took the graphics market from them
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    The 2D paint production was never taken over by SGI. That was essentially a clone of Quantel Paintbox which was locked into its own custom hardware but survived the 90s.
    - lispm 3y ago
      The Symbolics graphics software was bought by Nichimen. Nichimen ported it to SGI/IRIX and Windows NT, using Franz Inc.'s Allegro Common Lisp. It was commercially available as N-World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-World
- paulpauper 3y ago
  Cheap PCs , CPUs, graphics chips, and software made many of these companies obsolete by the mid 90s.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >ithout even chugging along as a legacy systems provider (think OS/2). Haven't the same happened to SGI, DEC(VAX), and OS/2 itself? All much bigger successes at their time than Symbolics has ever been.
  - cbm-vic-20 3y ago
    DEC basically ended up getting commoditized by Linux; they still had momentum when moving from VAX to Alpha. In the early 90s they were able to migrate many of their VAX/VMS users to Alpha/OpenVMS and their Ultrix users to OSF-1, but by the end of the 90s, many of their ISVs had released Linux versions of their products. SGI at least had niche applications that let them hang on independently for a bit longer. DECs offerings really couldn't compete with that, and there was noting Compaq/HP could do about it.
    - nico 3y ago
      This is what is happening to Google now with AI
- rini17 3y ago
  Emacs was heavily inspired by the Lisp machine and is still widely used today. However, I tried to start using it several times and gave up in frustration, it just won't fit me. Various vi-compatible modes make it even worse. And I love Lisp but without Emacs I feel like second class citizen.
nico 3y ago
What does “symbolics” mean in this phrase? Why was it considered so important that it’s the first word in the name?
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Symbolics was the name of the company. [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics
  - nico 3y ago
    Thank you!
  - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
    Quite interesting moments in our history around these “vector spaces” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliCorp_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliCorp_(software)
    - nico 3y ago
      I wonder how many times we have reinvented the wheel Kinda like the Antikythera mechanism, something really old that when discovered in the future seems way ahead of its time
      - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
        True, true, after all, isn't Star Wars a documentary? > A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....
- Zambyte 3y ago
  As giantrobot said, Symbolics is the name of the company. I'd like to expand more on why. One feature that is relatively unique to Lisp is that it has a symbol type. Lisp code can use this type to represent Lisp code - making macros and dynamic code generation / evaluation a breeze. The name is a reference to this feature of Lisp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
idlewords 3y ago
Lisp was always such an odd animal, kind of the rotary engine of computer science. Although provably superior in every respect, no one ever seemed to build anything with it. Programmers in the thread, when was the moment you bailed on lisp? For me it was when I saw some lisp longbeard on a message board answer a newbie's question by pasting a script that would have deleted their filesystem. I think it was meant to be some kind of teaching moment. At that point I decided this was maybe too hardcore a language community for me. I'm curious to hear what broke others, particularly since this message board infamously began as a lisp fan site.
- shaunxcode 3y ago
  This is such a tired trope. Scheme, CL and clojure all have people building incredible things with them. Not to mention things like Cisco buying the company behind chez scheme. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself why nubank bought cognitect. Consider spritely goblins being built in scheme. lisp is a weapon.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the story about script wiping the filesystem is... well known, though I don't necessarily want to search the archives for it right now.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - chii 3y ago
    > all have people building incredible things with them. what the trope really meant is that why these lisp dialects do not become mainstream despite the sales pitch of it being superior. The examples mentioned are niche at most. Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project?
    - lispm 3y ago
sasafrasquatch 3y ago
Cycorp actively develops Cyc in a dialect of Lisp, which was originally written on Symbolics machines. Back when they had a physical office — in the before-times — they had a coffee table in the office lobby that was made out of a Symbolics, which when it was new cost over $20K.
- gumby 3y ago
  I wrote that code originally, back at MCC. There was an Interlisp-D code base (Doug had been at PARC — we even overlapped) but the hardware you could buy was just way too slow. Plus the Symbolics machines were just better. So I started from scratch and had the core system running in a long week end. Instead of “just growing” it had a layered architecture that people could build upon. It was possible to integrate the new types so deeply into the system that they were indistinguishable from “system” types, which kept people from making mistakes or trying to be cute. Hacking lispms may have been the most productive development environment I’ve used in my nature life. Note: I had two fully decked out machines (8 MW of RAM — 40 whole MB), one with a color display. Probably $100K of hardware for one developer. They got their money’s worth, but honestly how many institutions could afford that?
xkriva11 3y ago
If you want to try the system, look at CADR: https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/7475d8a3dbb56a1a https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/7475d8a3dbb56a1a I highly recommend do update the Fossil repository and load the patches, because they fix some mouse problems. See https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/64e5f59e4847d57c https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/64e5f59e4847d57c Unlike Genera, it is trivial to run it on modern machines and it is open. You may also see how much the fame of Symbolics is based on work done on MIT. And remind the history that lead to GNU.
- lispm 3y ago
  > If you want to try the system That's the original MIT Lisp Machine OS, but not Symbolics Genera and not their graphics suite, which was the software used for the created graphics (see the posted link).
  - xkriva11 3y ago
    Right. I should have emphasized it more. But it is the closest thing people can try now without violating copyright laws. Genera has an advanced command system and tools like Document Examiner, but the general experience is very close.
    - lispm 3y ago
      Genera also had S-Graphics (a suite of 2d and 3d graphics software and a bunch of hardware for it), which was used in the graphics demo linked above. The software and the computers to run it were commercially sold and used in TV and animation studios. A lot of the early 2d and 3d animation in commercials on TV were done with S-Graphics. There is no comparable thing in the MIT software. For example S-Graphics was used for this Apple introductory video for the Macintosh IIfx (1990). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUhd3FZERUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUhd3FZERUE
    - ahefner 3y ago
      I'm very excited by the recent CADR revival, but the original MIT system does feel primitive compared to the later Symbolics releases.
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]
mepian 3y ago
The graphics software shown in this video (S-Graphics aka S-Products) partially outlived Symbolics and was evolved into Nichimen N-World and later Izware Mirai. The last version is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/izware_mirai_1.1sp2 https://archive.org/details/izware_mirai_1.1sp2 The history of Symbolics Graphics Division is documented here: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/6-3-information-international-inc-triple-i/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/6-3...
- kaveh808 3y ago
  I began my 3D graphics development on a Symbolics workstation at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-80's. This was before the S-Graphics suite was released. [0] The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler. And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp. But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems. Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads. [0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-d22a0e2d83fa https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking... [1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9 https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
  - kaveh808 3y ago
    This thread brought back memories of what could have been a game-changer for Lisp in graphics: Whitney/Demos Productions. This was a company set up by the founders of Digital Productions of "The Last Starfighter" and Cray XMP fame. Their system was based around a Connection Machine and Symbolics workstations, with development to be done in Lisp. Unfortunately, they folded almost before they started, due to their funding falling through. One can only imagine how that might have changed the 3D production landscape.
agumonkey 3y ago
I'm case people see curious, I gathered a few links about this on http://old.reddit.com/r/nichimen http://old.reddit.com/r/nichimen
lodovic 3y ago
The graphics in the demo gave me the same vibe as the "Money for Nothing" music video by the Dire Straits. Does anyone know if that video was produced with such a machine?
- lispm 3y ago
  That video is mentioned to be created with th Bosch FGS-4000 system and a Quantel Paintbox.
- djmips 3y ago
  It's just the zeitgeist.
seanhunter 3y ago
My uncle wrote a TCP/IP stack for the early symbolics lisp machines. He told me at the time (probably early 90s) how they had what is now known as Time Travel Debugging[1]. I remember it just totally blew my mind when he told me in the debugger you could pause the process, step backwards, change some variables or even code, and then start going forwards again. Way ahead of their time. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/time-travel-debugging-overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

148 points by mepian 3y ago

I really don't understand how this company fell so far from grace. Their product was excellent. Don't get me wrong, I've read the history and understood how they failed to pivot from hardware Lisp machines, but they have completely vanished without even chugging along as a legacy systems provider (think OS/2). Does any of their influence survive in modern hardware or software design? I hardly ever see Genera cited.

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
I believe there is still a minimal group of people providing support to some legacy customers. From what I've heard they have an emulator that originally ran on Alpha but was recently ported to x86 and then to Apple Silicon ( https://twitter.com/gmpalter/status/1350663314968350723?s=20 https://twitter.com/gmpalter/status/1350663314968350723?s=20 ). IP issues I think are sort of unclear and so the legal release of the software is tricky, if not impossible.
- mepian 3y ago
  The intellectual property of Symbolics is currently owned by John C. Mallery, the developer of CL-HTTP aka the first US White House web server. He was interested in making it officially free, but unfortunately has gone silent about two years ago, according to the person who ported Genera to x86 and Apple Silicon: https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553414024392523 https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553414024392523
  - eschaton 3y ago
    If he acquired it from Topping’s estate, I’d like to see proof that Toppings actually paid for it.
  - gumby 3y ago
    I talk to him from time to time so he isn’t silent on every topic.
    - mepian 3y ago
      Could you please try to probe him on this topic?
convolvatron 3y ago
They were really expensive. Many of their customers were first wave AI shop, so when they shut down that was alot of revenue. I think sgi took the graphics market from them
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  The 2D paint production was never taken over by SGI. That was essentially a clone of Quantel Paintbox which was locked into its own custom hardware but survived the 90s.
  - lispm 3y ago
    The Symbolics graphics software was bought by Nichimen. Nichimen ported it to SGI/IRIX and Windows NT, using Franz Inc.'s Allegro Common Lisp. It was commercially available as N-World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-World
paulpauper 3y ago
Cheap PCs , CPUs, graphics chips, and software made many of these companies obsolete by the mid 90s.
coldtea 3y ago
>ithout even chugging along as a legacy systems provider (think OS/2). Haven't the same happened to SGI, DEC(VAX), and OS/2 itself? All much bigger successes at their time than Symbolics has ever been.
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  DEC basically ended up getting commoditized by Linux; they still had momentum when moving from VAX to Alpha. In the early 90s they were able to migrate many of their VAX/VMS users to Alpha/OpenVMS and their Ultrix users to OSF-1, but by the end of the 90s, many of their ISVs had released Linux versions of their products. SGI at least had niche applications that let them hang on independently for a bit longer. DECs offerings really couldn't compete with that, and there was noting Compaq/HP could do about it.
  - nico 3y ago
    This is what is happening to Google now with AI
rini17 3y ago
Emacs was heavily inspired by the Lisp machine and is still widely used today. However, I tried to start using it several times and gave up in frustration, it just won't fit me. Various vi-compatible modes make it even worse. And I love Lisp but without Emacs I feel like second class citizen.

nico 3y ago

What does “symbolics” mean in this phrase? Why was it considered so important that it’s the first word in the name?

giantrobot 3y ago
Symbolics was the name of the company. [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics
- nico 3y ago
  Thank you!
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Quite interesting moments in our history around these “vector spaces” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliCorp_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliCorp_(software)
  - nico 3y ago
    I wonder how many times we have reinvented the wheel Kinda like the Antikythera mechanism, something really old that when discovered in the future seems way ahead of its time
    - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
      True, true, after all, isn't Star Wars a documentary? > A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....
Zambyte 3y ago
As giantrobot said, Symbolics is the name of the company. I'd like to expand more on why. One feature that is relatively unique to Lisp is that it has a symbol type. Lisp code can use this type to represent Lisp code - making macros and dynamic code generation / evaluation a breeze. The name is a reference to this feature of Lisp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression

idlewords 3y ago

Lisp was always such an odd animal, kind of the rotary engine of computer science. Although provably superior in every respect, no one ever seemed to build anything with it. Programmers in the thread, when was the moment you bailed on lisp? For me it was when I saw some lisp longbeard on a message board answer a newbie's question by pasting a script that would have deleted their filesystem. I think it was meant to be some kind of teaching moment. At that point I decided this was maybe too hardcore a language community for me. I'm curious to hear what broke others, particularly since this message board infamously began as a lisp fan site.

shaunxcode 3y ago
This is such a tired trope. Scheme, CL and clojure all have people building incredible things with them. Not to mention things like Cisco buying the company behind chez scheme. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself why nubank bought cognitect. Consider spritely goblins being built in scheme. lisp is a weapon.
- p_l 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the story about script wiping the filesystem is... well known, though I don't necessarily want to search the archives for it right now.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- chii 3y ago
  > all have people building incredible things with them. what the trope really meant is that why these lisp dialects do not become mainstream despite the sales pitch of it being superior. The examples mentioned are niche at most. Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project?
  - lispm 3y ago

sasafrasquatch 3y ago

Cycorp actively develops Cyc in a dialect of Lisp, which was originally written on Symbolics machines. Back when they had a physical office — in the before-times — they had a coffee table in the office lobby that was made out of a Symbolics, which when it was new cost over $20K.

gumby 3y ago
I wrote that code originally, back at MCC. There was an Interlisp-D code base (Doug had been at PARC — we even overlapped) but the hardware you could buy was just way too slow. Plus the Symbolics machines were just better. So I started from scratch and had the core system running in a long week end. Instead of “just growing” it had a layered architecture that people could build upon. It was possible to integrate the new types so deeply into the system that they were indistinguishable from “system” types, which kept people from making mistakes or trying to be cute. Hacking lispms may have been the most productive development environment I’ve used in my nature life. Note: I had two fully decked out machines (8 MW of RAM — 40 whole MB), one with a color display. Probably $100K of hardware for one developer. They got their money’s worth, but honestly how many institutions could afford that?

xkriva11 3y ago

If you want to try the system, look at CADR: https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/7475d8a3dbb56a1a https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/7475d8a3dbb56a1a I highly recommend do update the Fossil repository and load the patches, because they fix some mouse problems. See https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/64e5f59e4847d57c https://tumbleweed.nu/r/bug-lispm/forumpost/64e5f59e4847d57c Unlike Genera, it is trivial to run it on modern machines and it is open. You may also see how much the fame of Symbolics is based on work done on MIT. And remind the history that lead to GNU.

lispm 3y ago
> If you want to try the system That's the original MIT Lisp Machine OS, but not Symbolics Genera and not their graphics suite, which was the software used for the created graphics (see the posted link).
- xkriva11 3y ago
  Right. I should have emphasized it more. But it is the closest thing people can try now without violating copyright laws. Genera has an advanced command system and tools like Document Examiner, but the general experience is very close.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Genera also had S-Graphics (a suite of 2d and 3d graphics software and a bunch of hardware for it), which was used in the graphics demo linked above. The software and the computers to run it were commercially sold and used in TV and animation studios. A lot of the early 2d and 3d animation in commercials on TV were done with S-Graphics. There is no comparable thing in the MIT software. For example S-Graphics was used for this Apple introductory video for the Macintosh IIfx (1990). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUhd3FZERUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUhd3FZERUE
  - ahefner 3y ago
    I'm very excited by the recent CADR revival, but the original MIT system does feel primitive compared to the later Symbolics releases.

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

[dead]

mepian 3y ago

The graphics software shown in this video (S-Graphics aka S-Products) partially outlived Symbolics and was evolved into Nichimen N-World and later Izware Mirai. The last version is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/izware_mirai_1.1sp2 https://archive.org/details/izware_mirai_1.1sp2 The history of Symbolics Graphics Division is documented here: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/6-3-information-international-inc-triple-i/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/6-3...

kaveh808 3y ago
I began my 3D graphics development on a Symbolics workstation at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-80's. This was before the S-Graphics suite was released. [0] The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler. And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp. But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems. Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads. [0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-d22a0e2d83fa https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking... [1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9 https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
- kaveh808 3y ago
  This thread brought back memories of what could have been a game-changer for Lisp in graphics: Whitney/Demos Productions. This was a company set up by the founders of Digital Productions of "The Last Starfighter" and Cray XMP fame. Their system was based around a Connection Machine and Symbolics workstations, with development to be done in Lisp. Unfortunately, they folded almost before they started, due to their funding falling through. One can only imagine how that might have changed the 3D production landscape.

agumonkey 3y ago

I'm case people see curious, I gathered a few links about this on http://old.reddit.com/r/nichimen http://old.reddit.com/r/nichimen

lodovic 3y ago

The graphics in the demo gave me the same vibe as the "Money for Nothing" music video by the Dire Straits. Does anyone know if that video was produced with such a machine?

lispm 3y ago
That video is mentioned to be created with th Bosch FGS-4000 system and a Quantel Paintbox.
djmips 3y ago
It's just the zeitgeist.

seanhunter 3y ago

My uncle wrote a TCP/IP stack for the early symbolics lisp machines. He told me at the time (probably early 90s) how they had what is now known as Time Travel Debugging[1]. I remember it just totally blew my mind when he told me in the debugger you could pause the process, step backwards, change some variables or even code, and then start going forwards again. Way ahead of their time. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/time-travel-debugging-overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...