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[CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp

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  [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-06-13 11:37 +0000
    Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-06-13 09:44 -0700
      Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-06-13 19:06 +0000
      Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> - 2014-06-13 21:03 +0000
        Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-06-15 10:36 +0000
          Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Robert Swindells <rjs@fdy2.co.uk> - 2014-06-15 13:03 +0000
            Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> - 2014-06-15 16:11 -0700
              Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-06-15 16:34 -0700
                Re: [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp Robert Swindells <rjs@fdy2.co.uk> - 2014-06-16 08:48 +0000

#3653 — [CM] Two interesting articles on Symbolics/Lisp

Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the developer
productivity
http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics

//-clip
The Lisp Machine was a real workstation for the AI software developer.
It was not a personal computer to play games, browse the web, watch
DVDs or copy music from your friends. It was also not a multi-user
server. It was initially designed as a powerful single-user workstation
supporting the development of complex Artificial Intelligence software.
Its main task was to enable the software developer to write the most
complex programs possible. It was also grounded in the believe that
software development is best done by small groups of very good software
engineers working in a networked environment. Users that demanded and
got the best tool. The base system started with $70,000. A tool whose
keyboard was as expensive as a PC today. It didn't come with lots of
'media' keys on the keyboard, the operating systems wasn't dumbed down
to the least educated user. It was from experts for experts. It was
completely programmable with all source code. It was also not for
'playing' around - for that it was too expensive. As a software
developer you could focus on your task and the whole operating system
was supporting you. There was no piece of software that was not
accessible in a few mouse clicks. Everything could be inspected,
everything was up for modification. Software was live and dynamic. Not
dead and static like today. There was no boundary between software
development and software usage. The software was directly connected to
the hardware. A keypress runs a Lisp function - written in an
high-level language. The Lisp function talks to the chips and
interfaces.
//-clip

Why did Symbolics fail?
by Dan Weinreb (I think)
http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-symbolics-fail/

//-clip
The following is oversimplified but should be good enough. My old
friends are very welcome to post comments with corrections or
additions, and of course everyone is invited to post comments.

First, remember that at the time Symbolics started around 1980, serious
computer users used timesharing systems. The very idea of a whole
computer for one person was audacious, almost heretical. Every computer
company (think Prime, Data General, DEC) did their own hardware and
their own software suite. There were no PCs’, no Mac’s, no
workstations. At the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, fifteen
researchers shared a computer with a .001 GHz CPU and .002 GB of main
memory.

Symbolics sold to two kinds of customers, which I’ll call primary and
secondary. The primary customers used Lisp machines as software
development environments. The original target market was the MIT AI Lab
itself, followed by similar institutions: universities, corporate
research labs, and so on. The secondary customers used Lisp machines to
run applications that had been written by some other party.

We had great success amongst primary customers. I think we could have
found a lot more of them if our marketing had been better. For example,
did you know that Symbolics had a world-class software development
environment for Fortran, C, Ada, and other popular languages, with
amazing semantics-understanding in the editor, a powerful debugger, the
ability for the languages to call each other, and so on? We put a lot
of work into those, but they were never publicized or advertised.

But we knew that the only way to really succeed was to develop the
secondary market. ICAD made an advanced constraint-based computer-aided
design system that ran only on Symbolics machines. Sadly, they were the
only company that ever did. Why?
//-clip

-- 
RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>

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#3657

RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
> Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the developer
> productivity
> http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics

That article was interesting but I don't understand why it said
"Symbolics Lisp Machine" in almost every sentence.  Most everything in
the article applied to all of the MIT-descended Lisp machines that were
made by several manufacturers including Symbolics, in addition to the
machines that MIT itself made.

The author used to post to this newsgroup but I haven't seen him here
lately.  

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#3659

On 2014-06-13, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
> Most everything in
> the article applied to all of the MIT-descended Lisp machines that were
> made by several manufacturers including Symbolics, in addition to the
> machines that MIT itself made.

Where did the Xerox 1100 series InterLISP machines fit into this?

(I worked on those for a while.)

-- 
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 18th day of Confusion in the YOLD 3180
"I do not believe in revealed religion — I will have nothing to do with your
immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating on
another." Lord Byron, 1778-1824, letter to Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811

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#3662

On 2014-06-13, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
>> Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the developer
>> productivity
>> http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
>
> That article was interesting but I don't understand why it said
> "Symbolics Lisp Machine" in almost every sentence.

Search engine spam. It wants to be high ranked in search engine
indexes for that keyword.

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#3672

On 2014-06-13, Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> wrote:
> On 2014-06-13, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>> RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
>>> Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the developer
>>> productivity
>>> http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
>>
>> That article was interesting but I don't understand why it said
>> "Symbolics Lisp Machine" in almost every sentence.
>
> Search engine spam. It wants to be high ranked in search engine
> indexes for that keyword.

A reasonable guess, but there can't be a huge number of webcrawlers out
there desperately looking for that keyword combination.  If they're
hoping to sell ads, they've not chosen a topic that will make them rich.
Could just be a matter of sloppy writing, too.

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#3683

On Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:36:19 +0000, RS Wood wrote:

> On 2014-06-13, Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> wrote:
>> On 2014-06-13, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>> RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
>>>> Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the
>>>> developer productivity
>>>> http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
>>>
>>> That article was interesting but I don't understand why it said
>>> "Symbolics Lisp Machine" in almost every sentence.
>>
>> Search engine spam. It wants to be high ranked in search engine indexes
>> for that keyword.
> 
> A reasonable guess, but there can't be a huge number of webcrawlers out
> there desperately looking for that keyword combination.  If they're
> hoping to sell ads, they've not chosen a topic that will make them rich.
> Could just be a matter of sloppy writing, too.

I don't think it is search engine spam, the hosting site is a fairly low
power machine with no ads.

I don't see anything that is incorrect in the article, stuff that is
specific to Symbolics is identified clearly.

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#3692

On 6/15/2014 6:03 AM, Robert Swindells wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:36:19 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>
>> On 2014-06-13, Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> wrote:
>>> On 2014-06-13, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>>> RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
>>>>> Ergonomics of the Symoblics Lisp machine - reflections on the
>>>>> developer productivity
>>>>> http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
>>>>
>>>> That article was interesting but I don't understand why it said
>>>> "Symbolics Lisp Machine" in almost every sentence.
>>>
>>> Search engine spam. It wants to be high ranked in search engine indexes
>>> for that keyword.
>>
>> A reasonable guess, but there can't be a huge number of webcrawlers out
>> there desperately looking for that keyword combination.  If they're
>> hoping to sell ads, they've not chosen a topic that will make them rich.
>> Could just be a matter of sloppy writing, too.
>
> I don't think it is search engine spam, the hosting site is a fairly low
> power machine with no ads.
>
> I don't see anything that is incorrect in the article, stuff that is
> specific to Symbolics is identified clearly.
>

I think the key issues of the time are somewhat misconstrued.  The
market in the early 1980s included a host of Motorola 68000-based
Unix workstations at a price point of about $10,000.  (There were
some other specialty CPUs as well, e.g. Xerox, VAX, CMU). Not perhaps
as nice as a Symbolics system but good enough for many
programmers, even Lisp programmers, to work comfortably. So-called
3-M machines ... 1 megapixel, 1 megahertz, 1 megabyte proliferated.

Of course now such machines would be considered terribly weak and
$10k would be considered outrageous,  but that was then.

Consider, how many users of Symbolics machines really took advantage
of the fact that the Lisp source code of the operating system was
hackable? Maybe it was overkill and consequently overpriced? The
Symbolics-and-no-substitutes acceptable market was, I thought, primarily 
DARPA contractors. Sort of like the Connection Machine
business, I suppose.

 From a business perspective, one might seriously consider the advantage 
of programmers writing an application based on
Lisp (or C or ...) running on a Sun-3 which you knew
could then be distributed on other Sun-3  $10k systems to
your customers. And you might choose C over Lisp because of any
number of reasons (not worth arguing about here).  Using a
Symbolics machine for C was presumably possible but not very
attractive.

While Symbolics eventually got to the point of
making/selling lower-cost application delivery systems,
maybe it was already too late.

Note that one Lisp program, considered important at the time,
Macsyma, was purchased from MIT by Symbolics, but Symbolics was loathe
to distribute it on anything but Symbolics machines.  Did they
make a strategic mistake by not selling the software on those
other machines? (Especially VAX) Until too late..

I agree with the notion implicit in the cited remarks that
Symbolics provided a productive environment, and many subsequent
systems (e.g. IBM PC, MS-DOS, Windows) represented huge backward
steps. But Symbolics' user interface was not without rivals from
Sun, Bell Labs (BLT), Xerox, Apollo, DEC, Tektronix, IBM (RT), HP, 
Apple(Lisa), CMU and probably others
in that time frame.  All of them ran Lisp. Most of them could run
Macsyma, starting circa 1979.  I suspect that it became
increasingly difficult to argue that Symbolics' "special sauce" was
so special or even was the right sauce (cf. various AI winters)
for what people thought they needed.

Richard Fateman

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#3694

Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> I agree with the notion implicit in the cited remarks that Symbolics
> provided a productive environment, and many subsequent systems
> (e.g. IBM PC, MS-DOS, Windows) represented huge backward steps. But
> Symbolics' user interface was not without rivals from Sun, Bell Labs
> (BLT), Xerox, Apollo, DEC, Tektronix, IBM (RT), HP, Apple(Lisa), CMU
> and probably others in that time frame.

Well, when I asked why Rainer singled out Symbolics, I was getting at
something narrower, which is that most of the stuff in the article
applied to all of the MIT-descended Lisp machines, not just Symbolics.
Those included the original CADR, the TI Exploder, the LMI machines, and
there may have been another one?  They had the same hardware
architecture (the later hardware implementations diverged) and mostly
the same software as the Symbolics machines, from what I gather.  I
didn't get to use any of them very much though, so differences between
them may be going past me.  

Fairly recently there were some projects to emulate the CADR hardware on
modern PC's and then run the original CADR code on them.  I don't know
if any of those reached usability though.

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#3699

On Sun, 15 Jun 2014 16:34:43 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

> Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
>> I agree with the notion implicit in the cited remarks that Symbolics
>> provided a productive environment, and many subsequent systems (e.g.
>> IBM PC, MS-DOS, Windows) represented huge backward steps. But
>> Symbolics' user interface was not without rivals from Sun, Bell Labs
>> (BLT), Xerox, Apollo, DEC, Tektronix, IBM (RT), HP, Apple(Lisa), CMU
>> and probably others in that time frame.
> 
> Well, when I asked why Rainer singled out Symbolics, I was getting at
> something narrower, which is that most of the stuff in the article
> applied to all of the MIT-descended Lisp machines, not just Symbolics.
> Those included the original CADR, the TI Exploder, the LMI machines, and
> there may have been another one?  They had the same hardware
> architecture (the later hardware implementations diverged) and mostly
> the same software as the Symbolics machines, from what I gather.  I
> didn't get to use any of them very much though, so differences between
> them may be going past me.

The MIT/LMI/TI machines didn't have the presentation-style user-interface
that provides some of the features that Rainer describes.

> Fairly recently there were some projects to emulate the CADR hardware on
> modern PC's and then run the original CADR code on them.  I don't know
> if any of those reached usability though.

The CADR emulator works fine, the problem is that we only have saved memory
images of very early versions of the software and it is difficult to
bootstrap to the later Common Lisp compatible versions.

There is also a TI Explorer I emulator but we don't have the microcode
sources for it unlike for the CADR.

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