21 Apr
2002
21 Apr
'02
5:25 a.m.
On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Derek Peschel wrote:
http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/nltt/medley/
I sent you a personal mesasge and then you replied to
the list... either
your mail server is "smart" (fills in To: automatically) or you did some
extra typing. *grumble* *mutter* So we might as well bring the discussion
back to the list (i.e., yes, I realize I'm replying to the list this time).
On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 07:52:02AM -0700, Peter C. Wallace wrote:
Of course it evolved, what commercial computer systems vintage 1985 did not
evolve from earlier systems? The proportion of new ideas embodied in the
36xx is probably as high or higher than many other systems of the time.
Baroque compared to what? Other Lisp environments? Other operating systems?
> The design of both the software and the
hardware strikes me as baroque
> (typical MIT "just keep adding features" hacking). Also the system as a
I dont think that there was a whole lot there
that was not needed. A
tagged architecture 36 bit machine with paged virtual memory, ECC, capable of
executing about 5 million Lisp instructions a second was not trivial to build
in 1985...
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying it was trivial, I'm saying it seems
to have evolved more than being designed from the ground up. Come on,
look at the keyboard. And the software is still baroque. Powerful,
but baroque. You can download a Interlisp/common lisp
environment from PARC that will run
under Linux (its actually an application (LFG)) but you can play with SEdit
and Tedit) ...
Do you have a URL?
-- Derek
Peter Wallace