As one of the machine designers, it is gratifying to see continued interest. My favorite feature which I miss daily is the WHO line, with run bars and mouse documentation lines. And, of course, the correct placement of rubout along with the missing meta, hyper, super modifiers.
Hi Tom, do you you know anyone from those days that might help us track down the Prolog and Ada implementations for Symbolics? http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/spg
We heard from David Schmidt that some of the software was lost during one of the office moves, but we're hopeful someone kept a copy.
Haha, I'll vouch that it is him. He's a cofounder of a YC company with me (Ginkgo Bioworks) and I emailed him about this thread a couple hours ago. But I would like to see him take the quiz someone posted below :)
At the very least, I can assure you he's familiar with Lisp Machines, I miss those things too.
Let me ask a few questions, e.g. I've been getting into electrics more directly as of late, and:
Which logic families did the CADR and 3600 use? (The LMI LAMBDA was designed to use 74F for Fast and Fairchild. Which wasn't initially good when the ALU was first tried out, its outputs oscillated at ~100MHz, then a CADR logic family chip was put in it to proceed for the moment.)
Ah, here's obscure stuff very few would know: who made the CONS machine's disk and controller, what was the size of the disk, and what was special about the particular controller unit? Several boards, separated by...?
Strangely enough, in this technological vastness of the future, Google is no help with the later paragraph's questions, except maybe the size.
Well, most of it was 74S series for the faster logic. 74F was not available at the time the machine was designed. The disk was a Fujitsu 80 Megabyte wonder. Who knew you could possibly make them that large in such a small rack sized unit. Here's one for you: Who made the CORE memory for that machine?
Hmmm, I or rather my computer center "inherited" an 80 MiB CDC stand alone SMD drive with a Xylogics (sp?) prototype Unibus controller, which I was told was the CONS machine's disk drive, but I wasn't involved in that acquisition. You aren't thinking of the Fujitsu Eagle 10.5 inch 470 MiB Winchester rack mount disk drives that everyone including LMI loved in the early '80s are you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Eagle)? That was an amazing drive, Fujitsu was turning out a lot of nice stuff, their Sparrow? 8 inch 80 MiB? drives powered a set of WD->TI workstations that were donated to MIT, that I and a friend salvaged 4 of for the EECS database computer in the late '80s.
Core, yow; we weren't sweeping up raw memory, although it was sweet that our 2nd hand from the Logo Lab's PDP-11/45 had core, made booting from a crash easy unless the boot code had been scribbled on. I suppose you used some core because it was handy and DRAM was dear? If it was DRAM, I'd assume simply from the date and their partly being located in Worcester, it was Mostek, and I can imagine you itching to design a memory system with their addressed DRAMs. If you were familiar with the Intel 1103 from it being used (or so I was told) in the MIT-AI and Logo 11/45 display systems, and it being available, then that?
As I recall, LMI's CADRs used 74LS logic, but I could easily be wrong.
(Besides working for LMI in 1982-3 and playing with CADRs before then, in 1980 I started a student run computer center using the Logo Lab's then surplus 11/45; much of this I know from being told as opposed to direct knowledge, but I do have a weird memory for details.
And, hmmm, I guess I did a lot of salvage in the '80s; that student computer center eventually ended up with MIT-AI's KA10, and my EE friends marveled at the schematics, pre-standardized symbols and occasionally a gate's output would be hit hard to change its state.)
I worked on the Symbolics machines as well as the old CADRs as a mere undergrad on the 7th floor, and totally took for granted that I was working on machines ahead of their time. Pretty much spoiled me rotten, and had to seriously adjust when I hit the real world. ;)
Well, many of the concepts of the lisp machine are extremely relevant to the current design problems of today's CPUs, primarily around security and privacy. The continuing disaster promulgated on the world by languages such as C can only be solved by enforcing type safety and bounds checking in hardware. There continues to be progress in making these easier and more efficient to implement. I'd suggest looking at the SAFE architecture papers, especially the low-fat pointer paper: http://www.crash-safe.org/papers.html
At least on OS X, you could probably implement something like this using supported functionality for interrogating the OS state, and even interrogating the state of running applications using the accessibility APIs.
