5 ms·

I wish these weren't so unobtanium... I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines, and as pa

by floren 2y ago

I wish these weren't so unobtanium... I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines, and as part of that I'd like to spend time hands-on with the real hardware, but it's hard and expensive to find the damn things.

throw16180339 2y ago
The Open Genera version for the Alpha is a lot easier to obtain. There's also a bootleg version that ported the Alpha assembly to C. It apparently run on Linux x64 at some point. IIRC, it depends on some removed X11 features, so it may be difficult to run on a current OS.
- db48x 2y ago
  https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
- floren 2y ago
  Yeah, you need an old Linux version IIRC because it depends on a particular NFS version... I think it's important to get a feel for how the actual hardware felt, though.
  - p_l 2y ago
    It needs NFSv2 in the images as distributed on OpenGenera 2.0 distribution CDs - there exist patches for NFSv3, but there are also userland NFSv2 servers that can be used. For integration of some of the network details, you need NIS (aka Yellow Pages). The big issue is X11, because around X.Org R7 they have made changes that result in hangs of the Genera X11 client in certain conditions, including IIRC handling of modifier keys - and crucially it will hang on shutting down the machine (for example to save new image). There are patches for everything other than NIS (and you can avoid using NIS), but you have to hunt for them. AFAIK they are included as part of Portable Genera.
    - floren 2y ago
      Are the NFSv3 patches available anywhere in a form I can use without having an existing running Genera system? Also if you can recommend me a userland NFSv2 server I'll give that a shot too.
      - p_l 2y ago
        It seems nfs-ganesha which used to have v2 support dropped it since then, but you might be able to compile 1.5.x release tree which is still on github. As for patched systems, I know I have seen places which had patched images to load from, but there's non-trivial chance that they are slightly bitrotted. One place is here http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html Of course, Portable Genera has official patches for the issues involved.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Another thing you might choose to do is run another (closer) descendant of one the last MIT AI Lab versions of Lisp machine system software, pieced together from tape backups of the AI Lab. Like Plan 9, the community seems to have spun itself its own living distro, still running on MIT CADR simulators. [1], [2]. [1] https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ [2] https://metebalci.com/blog/cadr-lisp-machine-and-cadr-processor/ https://metebalci.com/blog/cadr-lisp-machine-and-cadr-proces...
- lproven 2y ago
  Howto: https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/1e7aadfc22e3ae908921aeaccf27e82d https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/1e7aadfc22e3ae908921aeaccf2...
  - floren 2y ago
    I've followed the loomcom instructions before, but the problem is that as far as I can tell, Debian has entirely removed the ability to run NFSv2 servers from their distribution: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/nfs-utils/-/commit/2c2c36c59fa1de2ff7fd28917e54700ecb39b730 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/nfs-utils/-/commit/2c2c... I'll try configuring a FreeBSD VM and see if I can get NFSv2 running there, then it's just the trick of figuring out how to make the Genera VM talk on my actual network instead of just that tap...
    - p_l 2y ago
      At least once my approach for running involved having an Solaris 10 VM running Xsun for the console, might try that again with lx branded zone :V
linguae 2y ago
Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Museum in Seattle back in 2019, I saw that there were no Lisp machines available, though I did get to see and use other rare machines such as the Xerox Alto, the Apple Lisa, and the original NeXT cube (I'm glad I finally got to add one to my collection a few years ago). MIT CADR has been made open source for quite some time (https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/), and I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D is now open source (https://interlisp.org/ https://interlisp.org/). However, the holy grail of Lisp machine environments, Symbolics Genera, is still not available as FOSS. Funnily enough, this is fitting since Richard Stallman's frustrations with Symbolics was one of the catalysts behind his starting the GNU Project. One of the interesting "what could have been" moments of computing history is Apple's exploration of Lisp in the late 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s. Such projects include: - Apple's original plans for the Newton, which included an OS written in Lisp. - The Dylan programming language, which I've heard can be thought of as Scheme with the Common Lisp Object System. Dylan was originally designed to be the official language used to develop Newton apps. Originally Dylan had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. However, the Newton ended up using a C++-based operating system, and NewtonScript, which wasn't based on a Lisp, was created as the language for developing Newton apps. - SK8 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) ), which was dubbed "HyperCard on steroids," was written in Common Lisp. In an alternate timeline, we could've been using Apple devices built on a Lisp foundation. This is probably the closest we've gotten to Lisp machines on the desktop, as opposed to specialized AI workstations that cost five figures in 1980s dollars. Then again, things worked out well for Apple after the NeXT purchase. The OpenStep API (which became Cocoa) and Objective-C was (and still is) solid infrastructure than can be thought of as a "pragmatic Smalltalk" desktop, though in recent years I feel Apple has been moving on from NeXT influences and is doing its own thing now with Swift.
- neilv 2y ago
  > had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. They can be forgiven, at the time. Now we have evidence that thinking is wrong. Today we have half of everyone and their dog, as Web programmers, using a syntax originally chosen by very technical systems programmers. (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.) Almost no Web developers are systems programmers, and this is just a poor syntax for the work, and needlessly cryptic, but they can pick up even this bad syntax just fine. Now we know that, whether you use curly braces, parentheses, whitespace, or something else is not the barrier to learning a programming language. It's one of the most absolutely trivial things about it to learn. Knowing this, the next time I hear someone say "We can't use this syntax, because it will just totally break people's brains, even though the higher grammar, semantics, libraries, domain frameworks, and everything else are different anyway, and are orders of magnitude harder to learn, we need to make it look superficially like something it's not, because people are full of poo"... I'm ready to appropriate the Lily Allen song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U
reikonomusha 2y ago
I know someone in the US with Symbolics hardware (actual Lisp machines and MacIvory) as well as TI MicroExplorer for quiet sale. Email is in profile.
amszmidt 2y ago
Much of the user experience of the Lisp Machine was just the console. Users would seldom interact directly with the actual hardware which would be in some lab or hall. You had special key sequences so you could even hard reboot the machine if it got stuck. Both the CADR and Lambda have simulators that work very well and are Free Software. You won’t be missing out much by using a simulator. :-)
- lispm 2y ago
  A Symbolics MacIvory or a TI MicroExplorer would typically sit at/under/on the desk.
  - p_l 2y ago
    The TI Explorers were much more common to be deployed in separate room than Symbolics, AFAIK, due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default (an optional thing for symbolics which used IIRC BNC). I remember seeing photos of rows of them being shuffled around at some point at one of the NASA sites. Explorer also had some interesting hardware options that probably evolved from LMI Lambda support for running Unix on separate board, for example I've seen documentation about pretty big stack of DSP as special compute accelerator usable from Lisp environment for dealing with live signal processing.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default I would NEVER imagine a graphical console that’s connected that way to a machine. This is why preserving these machines is so important - it’s hard to even know the tech we’d lose (and be doomed to reinvent) when the machines are lost to time.
      - p_l 2y ago
        Significant part of extant, or at least longer-surviving, Matrox business once they mostly got out of GPU space was in devices like that - displays connected by long cables, things like specialized GPUs with 8P8C or fiber connectors that provided DisplayPort + USB over longer range, to connect users to computer running elsewhere.
privong 2y ago
> I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines I would love to hear more about this. I have a friend whose mother-in-law was involved in a startup that was selling software for LISP Machines back in the day. She's told me a little about it but I am seeing if I can get more info. Would you be willing to keep me in the loop if you ever do get around to writing a book? Email is: accounts5 [at] [HN username, minus g].com

by floren 2y ago

throw16180339 2y ago

The Open Genera version for the Alpha is a lot easier to obtain. There's also a bootleg version that ported the Alpha assembly to C. It apparently run on Linux x64 at some point. IIRC, it depends on some removed X11 features, so it may be difficult to run on a current OS.

db48x 2y ago
https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
floren 2y ago
Yeah, you need an old Linux version IIRC because it depends on a particular NFS version... I think it's important to get a feel for how the actual hardware felt, though.
- p_l 2y ago
  It needs NFSv2 in the images as distributed on OpenGenera 2.0 distribution CDs - there exist patches for NFSv3, but there are also userland NFSv2 servers that can be used. For integration of some of the network details, you need NIS (aka Yellow Pages). The big issue is X11, because around X.Org R7 they have made changes that result in hangs of the Genera X11 client in certain conditions, including IIRC handling of modifier keys - and crucially it will hang on shutting down the machine (for example to save new image). There are patches for everything other than NIS (and you can avoid using NIS), but you have to hunt for them. AFAIK they are included as part of Portable Genera.
  - floren 2y ago
    Are the NFSv3 patches available anywhere in a form I can use without having an existing running Genera system? Also if you can recommend me a userland NFSv2 server I'll give that a shot too.
    - p_l 2y ago
      It seems nfs-ganesha which used to have v2 support dropped it since then, but you might be able to compile 1.5.x release tree which is still on github. As for patched systems, I know I have seen places which had patched images to load from, but there's non-trivial chance that they are slightly bitrotted. One place is here http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html Of course, Portable Genera has official patches for the issues involved.
nxobject 2y ago
Another thing you might choose to do is run another (closer) descendant of one the last MIT AI Lab versions of Lisp machine system software, pieced together from tape backups of the AI Lab. Like Plan 9, the community seems to have spun itself its own living distro, still running on MIT CADR simulators. [1], [2]. [1] https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ [2] https://metebalci.com/blog/cadr-lisp-machine-and-cadr-processor/ https://metebalci.com/blog/cadr-lisp-machine-and-cadr-proces...
lproven 2y ago
Howto: https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/1e7aadfc22e3ae908921aeaccf27e82d https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/1e7aadfc22e3ae908921aeaccf2...
- floren 2y ago
  I've followed the loomcom instructions before, but the problem is that as far as I can tell, Debian has entirely removed the ability to run NFSv2 servers from their distribution: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/nfs-utils/-/commit/2c2c36c59fa1de2ff7fd28917e54700ecb39b730 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/nfs-utils/-/commit/2c2c... I'll try configuring a FreeBSD VM and see if I can get NFSv2 running there, then it's just the trick of figuring out how to make the Genera VM talk on my actual network instead of just that tap...
  - p_l 2y ago
    At least once my approach for running involved having an Solaris 10 VM running Xsun for the console, might try that again with lx branded zone :V

linguae 2y ago

Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Museum in Seattle back in 2019, I saw that there were no Lisp machines available, though I did get to see and use other rare machines such as the Xerox Alto, the Apple Lisa, and the original NeXT cube (I'm glad I finally got to add one to my collection a few years ago). MIT CADR has been made open source for quite some time (https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/), and I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D is now open source (https://interlisp.org/ https://interlisp.org/). However, the holy grail of Lisp machine environments, Symbolics Genera, is still not available as FOSS. Funnily enough, this is fitting since Richard Stallman's frustrations with Symbolics was one of the catalysts behind his starting the GNU Project. One of the interesting "what could have been" moments of computing history is Apple's exploration of Lisp in the late 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s. Such projects include: - Apple's original plans for the Newton, which included an OS written in Lisp. - The Dylan programming language, which I've heard can be thought of as Scheme with the Common Lisp Object System. Dylan was originally designed to be the official language used to develop Newton apps. Originally Dylan had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. However, the Newton ended up using a C++-based operating system, and NewtonScript, which wasn't based on a Lisp, was created as the language for developing Newton apps. - SK8 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) ), which was dubbed "HyperCard on steroids," was written in Common Lisp. In an alternate timeline, we could've been using Apple devices built on a Lisp foundation. This is probably the closest we've gotten to Lisp machines on the desktop, as opposed to specialized AI workstations that cost five figures in 1980s dollars. Then again, things worked out well for Apple after the NeXT purchase. The OpenStep API (which became Cocoa) and Objective-C was (and still is) solid infrastructure than can be thought of as a "pragmatic Smalltalk" desktop, though in recent years I feel Apple has been moving on from NeXT influences and is doing its own thing now with Swift.

neilv 2y ago
> had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. They can be forgiven, at the time. Now we have evidence that thinking is wrong. Today we have half of everyone and their dog, as Web programmers, using a syntax originally chosen by very technical systems programmers. (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.) Almost no Web developers are systems programmers, and this is just a poor syntax for the work, and needlessly cryptic, but they can pick up even this bad syntax just fine. Now we know that, whether you use curly braces, parentheses, whitespace, or something else is not the barrier to learning a programming language. It's one of the most absolutely trivial things about it to learn. Knowing this, the next time I hear someone say "We can't use this syntax, because it will just totally break people's brains, even though the higher grammar, semantics, libraries, domain frameworks, and everything else are different anyway, and are orders of magnitude harder to learn, we need to make it look superficially like something it's not, because people are full of poo"... I'm ready to appropriate the Lily Allen song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U

reikonomusha 2y ago

I know someone in the US with Symbolics hardware (actual Lisp machines and MacIvory) as well as TI MicroExplorer for quiet sale. Email is in profile.

amszmidt 2y ago

Much of the user experience of the Lisp Machine was just the console. Users would seldom interact directly with the actual hardware which would be in some lab or hall. You had special key sequences so you could even hard reboot the machine if it got stuck. Both the CADR and Lambda have simulators that work very well and are Free Software. You won’t be missing out much by using a simulator. :-)

lispm 2y ago
A Symbolics MacIvory or a TI MicroExplorer would typically sit at/under/on the desk.
- p_l 2y ago
  The TI Explorers were much more common to be deployed in separate room than Symbolics, AFAIK, due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default (an optional thing for symbolics which used IIRC BNC). I remember seeing photos of rows of them being shuffled around at some point at one of the NASA sites. Explorer also had some interesting hardware options that probably evolved from LMI Lambda support for running Unix on separate board, for example I've seen documentation about pretty big stack of DSP as special compute accelerator usable from Lisp environment for dealing with live signal processing.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default I would NEVER imagine a graphical console that’s connected that way to a machine. This is why preserving these machines is so important - it’s hard to even know the tech we’d lose (and be doomed to reinvent) when the machines are lost to time.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Significant part of extant, or at least longer-surviving, Matrox business once they mostly got out of GPU space was in devices like that - displays connected by long cables, things like specialized GPUs with 8P8C or fiber connectors that provided DisplayPort + USB over longer range, to connect users to computer running elsewhere.

privong 2y ago

> I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines I would love to hear more about this. I have a friend whose mother-in-law was involved in a startup that was selling software for LISP Machines back in the day. She's told me a little about it but I am seeing if I can get more info. Would you be willing to keep me in the loop if you ever do get around to writing a book? Email is: accounts5 [at] [HN username, minus g].com