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.)
