Symbolics

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote: Yes, I had planned to. My SLR has been cranky recently, and I needed some photos from an event I performed at so I picked up one of those single-use jobs and have been filling up the rest of the roll with stuff from my collection. Let's hope they turn out respectably. (: One of the things I wanted to accomplish is to illustrate the amazing amounts of miniaturization 13 years can see. For example, one of the photos will be of one of the 1 MW ECC memory boards next to a pair of 32 MB ECC SIMMs from an HP 715. Anyway. The parens are where they normally are (over 9 and 0), but are also available unshifted where the square brackets would normally be. The square brackets have been moved to where the curly brackets would normally be (on this keyboar, above the unshifted parens) and the curly brackets have been moved to shifted keys which are in Siberia. What I find most amusing is the sheer number of 'modifier' keys on the keyboard. Caps-lock, shift, symbol, hyper, super, meta, control, and mode-lock. Plus perhaps one or two more which work as modifiers but which I don't recognise as such. According to the docs, the keyboard has 'unlimited rollover', meaning if you hit a key, the machine takes note of it no matter how many other keys you're holding down at the time. Mind-boggling. Apparently someone saw a great need for a user to be able to type an n-bit character set directly I'm not sure, but I don't think that X11 existed at the time this machine was current in 1987. X10, maybe, but the windowing system is its own thing. Nothing too fancy. I'd put it on par with the Apollo DM in terms of the kind of functionality it attempts to provide. Still? I'd be surprised. According to the User's Guide to Symbolics Computers: "The power, speed, and flexibility of Symbolics processing machines result Some of the special architecture features include: Tagged architecture Multiple caches Hardware stack management Pipelined instruction cycles Parallel processing Hardware assisted garbage collection Fully ECC'ed system memory (end of quote) I'm very intrigued by what I've learned about the system so far and am anxious to start it up and give it a try. I get the feeling that the LISPM is something of a transputer (like the parallel i860 boards that Microway used to sell which fit in an Intel PC), but with the balance of power between the transputer board and its host (LISPM and FEP, respectively) swapped around so that instead of the PC's OS hosting software which crunches away on the transputer, the OS actually runs on the LISPM, and the FEP's job is to boot the environment and then to handle I/O once the environment is running. I don't feel like I've described it very articulately, but I only vaguely understand what's going on at this point anyway. Still. It's an interesting conceptual leap! ok r.