Nice, but I wouldn't confuse static images with the underlying semantic graph of live objects that's not visible in pictures.
DonHopkins on June 14, 2014
Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.
I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":
There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.
It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).
He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!
Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:
Here's another Moon story from the humor directory:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/moon's.g...
Moon's I.T.S. CRASH PROCEDURE document from his home directory, which goes into much more detail than just turning it off and on:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/moon/klproc.11
And some cool Emacs lore:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore
Reposting this from the 2014 HN discussion of "Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679
http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879364
eudox on June 11, 2014
Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:
http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples
agumonkey on June 11, 2014
Nice, but I wouldn't confuse static images with the underlying semantic graph of live objects that's not visible in pictures.
DonHopkins on June 14, 2014
Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.
I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":
There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.
It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).
He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!
Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:
ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/mailing-lists/slug/900531/msg00339.html
Also eudox posted this link:
Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:
http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples....