6 ms·

Lisp Machines from LMI and Symbolics, too.

by lispm 2y ago

kragen 2y ago
while those gave a lot of attention to usability and certainly had graphics and windows, i don't think they really belong to the smalltalk/perq/lisa/macintosh lineage; they were sort of a parallel development track with different, less graphical, less event-driven conventions
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Maybe not the ones listed above, but Xerox PARC's Interlisp-D is another matter.
  - kragen 2y ago
    i feel like even interlisp-d, especially the 01970s version, has a pretty different style of interaction than smalltalk and the macintosh. i know a lot less about the perq
    - lispm 2y ago
      Definitely. Interlisp and Smalltalk were early on mostly driven by research (Interlisp -> everything AI, Smalltalk -> UI research, OOP, AI) and specific early applications. The Mac UI was early on more direct manipulation oriented. One thing to keep in mind: the UI state of the Art was fast evolving and applications under some of these systems might have UIs different from the underlying operating system. That would also be true on the Mac: HyperCard had a look&feel very different from the underlying Mac OS. For example Xerox developed "The Analyst" in Smalltalk 80 for the CIA: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Products_Apr87.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... I would think that NoteCards (written by Xerox in Interlisp-D) had similar customers and that there might also be some joint UI influence.
      - kragen 2y ago
        yeah, ui stuff was changing extremely fast. shneiderman's keynote where he introduced the term 'direct manipulation' wasn't even until 01982. his canonical examples of what he meant by 'direct manipulation' were, in order, emacs, visicalc, zooming in and out of gis data or a conceptual 2-d information space with a joystick, pong, missile command, space invaders, light-pen-driven cad/cam systems (into which category he shoehorns newspaper page layout and process control dashboards in continuous-flow plants), driving a car, recording and replaying robot motions, zloof's 01975 query by example, and finally, at the end, “advanced office automation systems” like the xerox star and ibm’s pictureworld in this context, it's amusing that p.6/36 of that scan you linked cites user interface uniformity as a key advantage of smalltalk: 'the environment's window facilities consistently adhere to a small number of user interface conventions that are quickly learned by casual and experienced users alike.' [39]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2092.2093 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2092.2093 "The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation, by Ben Shneiderman, originally presented as the Keynote Address at the NYU Symposium on User Interfaces, 01982-05-26–28, then published with numerous typographical errors in 01982, Behaviour & Information Technology, 1:3, 237-256, DOI 10.1080/01449298208914450"
- lispm 2y ago
  They were among the first graphical workstations: Large bitmap screen, disks, network, color option, mouse, window system, object-oriented software, fonts, gui framework, ... Before the Apple Lisa, the SUN-1, the Mac, ... These are Lisp Machine images/screen shots from MIT from 1980: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/LM_Screen_Shots_Jun1980.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/LM_Screen_Shots_Jun... * a dual screen machine with a electronics design system * Macsyma with plots * Inspector, Window Debugger, Font Editor * Music notation * first tiled screen/window manager * another electronic CAD tool The UI was developed using Flavors, the object-oriented system for the Lisp Machine (message passing, classes&objects, multiple inheritance, mixins, ...).
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    But unrelated. Merely another machine from the same time.
    - lispm 2y ago
      Like the PERQ is largely unrelated to the Smalltalk / Interlisp-D systems from Xerox, to LISA or the early Mac. It is somewhat related to the later NeXT (founded 1985, first release in 1988) -> Mach/Unix, ... The PERQ was just in the timeline between the Alto and the LISA/Mac. But there isn't much of a relationship to the latter two and not much to the Alto. The Alto was used to write stuff like its OS in BCPL, the Office software written in Mesa, Smalltalk, Interlisp, ... but AFAIK no UNIX and no PASCAL system. The PERQ did not run Alto-Software. Background information about the PERQ history: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workstations_Nov03.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/perq/RD_Dav...
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Also lots of influences, all the stuff Smalltalk influenced, Mesa influenced Modula-2, Cedar influenced Oberon and Modula-3. Followed by all the languages, those ones influenced as well.

Lisp Machines from LMI and Symbolics, too.

by lispm 2y ago

Lisp Machines from LMI and Symbolics, too.

while those gave a lot of attention to usability and certainly had graphics and windows, i don't think they really belong to the smalltalk/perq/lisa/macintosh lineage; they were sort of a parallel development track with different, less graphical, less event-driven conventions

pjmlp 2y ago
Maybe not the ones listed above, but Xerox PARC's Interlisp-D is another matter.
- kragen 2y ago
  i feel like even interlisp-d, especially the 01970s version, has a pretty different style of interaction than smalltalk and the macintosh. i know a lot less about the perq
  - lispm 2y ago
    Definitely. Interlisp and Smalltalk were early on mostly driven by research (Interlisp -> everything AI, Smalltalk -> UI research, OOP, AI) and specific early applications. The Mac UI was early on more direct manipulation oriented. One thing to keep in mind: the UI state of the Art was fast evolving and applications under some of these systems might have UIs different from the underlying operating system. That would also be true on the Mac: HyperCard had a look&feel very different from the underlying Mac OS. For example Xerox developed "The Analyst" in Smalltalk 80 for the CIA: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Products_Apr87.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... I would think that NoteCards (written by Xerox in Interlisp-D) had similar customers and that there might also be some joint UI influence.
    - kragen 2y ago
      yeah, ui stuff was changing extremely fast. shneiderman's keynote where he introduced the term 'direct manipulation' wasn't even until 01982. his canonical examples of what he meant by 'direct manipulation' were, in order, emacs, visicalc, zooming in and out of gis data or a conceptual 2-d information space with a joystick, pong, missile command, space invaders, light-pen-driven cad/cam systems (into which category he shoehorns newspaper page layout and process control dashboards in continuous-flow plants), driving a car, recording and replaying robot motions, zloof's 01975 query by example, and finally, at the end, “advanced office automation systems” like the xerox star and ibm’s pictureworld in this context, it's amusing that p.6/36 of that scan you linked cites user interface uniformity as a key advantage of smalltalk: 'the environment's window facilities consistently adhere to a small number of user interface conventions that are quickly learned by casual and experienced users alike.' [39]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2092.2093 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2092.2093 "The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation, by Ben Shneiderman, originally presented as the Keynote Address at the NYU Symposium on User Interfaces, 01982-05-26–28, then published with numerous typographical errors in 01982, Behaviour & Information Technology, 1:3, 237-256, DOI 10.1080/01449298208914450"
lispm 2y ago
They were among the first graphical workstations: Large bitmap screen, disks, network, color option, mouse, window system, object-oriented software, fonts, gui framework, ... Before the Apple Lisa, the SUN-1, the Mac, ... These are Lisp Machine images/screen shots from MIT from 1980: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/LM_Screen_Shots_Jun1980.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/LM_Screen_Shots_Jun... * a dual screen machine with a electronics design system * Macsyma with plots * Inspector, Window Debugger, Font Editor * Music notation * first tiled screen/window manager * another electronic CAD tool The UI was developed using Flavors, the object-oriented system for the Lisp Machine (message passing, classes&objects, multiple inheritance, mixins, ...).
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  But unrelated. Merely another machine from the same time.
  - lispm 2y ago
    Like the PERQ is largely unrelated to the Smalltalk / Interlisp-D systems from Xerox, to LISA or the early Mac. It is somewhat related to the later NeXT (founded 1985, first release in 1988) -> Mach/Unix, ... The PERQ was just in the timeline between the Alto and the LISA/Mac. But there isn't much of a relationship to the latter two and not much to the Alto. The Alto was used to write stuff like its OS in BCPL, the Office software written in Mesa, Smalltalk, Interlisp, ... but AFAIK no UNIX and no PASCAL system. The PERQ did not run Alto-Software. Background information about the PERQ history: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workstations_Nov03.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/perq/RD_Dav...
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Also lots of influences, all the stuff Smalltalk influenced, Mesa influenced Modula-2, Cedar influenced Oberon and Modula-3. Followed by all the languages, those ones influenced as well.