
A Story about Symbolics Lisp Machines - kremlin_
http://kremlin.enterprises/post/129364443055/your-code-is-so-bad-we-had-to-make-etclocal
======
ploxiln
"lisp machines were made by (pretty much) a single company (symbolics)"

Actually, there was a rivalry with another company that's really worth
mentioning, LMI (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Commercialization...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Commercialization_of_the_MIT_Lisp_Machine_technology))

"the amount of engineering effort that went into these machines far outweighs
what you might get in a modern computer" \- "the computer in front of you was
probably purchased for a sum between $100 and $1000, and it represents $100 to
$1000 worth of engineering. the kind of computer representing hundreds of
thousands to millions of dollars of engineering are, well, pretty slick"

That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. The design of the intel chip in your
cheap computer, and the fab process to manufacture it, really are worth
billions. It's just automation and scale that brings the price down to a
couple hundred.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Yeah... author should read Hackers before writing another word about history
of computing, there is hardly a correct sentence in that blog post -
[http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-
Anniversar...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversary-
Edition/dp/1449388396)

~~~
gizmo385
I'm reading this book for a class right now and, personally, haven't enjoyed
it so far. It treats these people as though the MIT hacker crowd as though
these people are/were gods and I think does a lot to dehumanize them. It just
reads like a fluff piece that skips over technical details in favor of what
feels like blind infatuation.

~~~
maxlybbert
The writing is so bad that it distracts from the story. It once mentions that
somebody had access to "the best computer in the world known to man." How many
computers exist that aren't known to man? I don't blame the writer in that
particular case, but the editor really should have known better.

In another case, Levy tells a story about a chess program with a bug in it. If
I remember correctly, the program was in check, and moved a knight that didn't
get the program out of check. In other words, it took an illegal move. Levy
says the programmers were in awe of this program; wondering if it was
inventing new rules to increase its enjoyment of chess. I have a hard time
believing the programmers truly thought they had created a self-aware program
that would modify the rules of a game to increase its own enjoyment. I'm sure
they knew a bug when they saw it. Levy, on the other hand, apparently did not,
or thought that his audience would overlook such a silly statement. I _do_
blame the writer for that one, and wonder why the editor didn't flag it as
well.

There are good books on computer history. And there are good books about
computers from the early days (written in the early days). "Hackers" is not
one of those books.

~~~
cafard
P.J. Plauger had an article once about a co-worker who coded a chess program,
which had two serious flaws: he got the search algorithm wrong, so that it was
very easy to beat; and he didn't program it to lose, so that it would start to
add pieces back in when it was about to. Plauger wrote, If you think kids
enjoyed beating it, you should have seen their glee when got it to cheat.

------
mrbill
Great acquisition! I'm jealous.

Symbolics stuff isn't as rare as the post claims; you can still buy the
Symbolics OpenGenera LISP environment for running on top of DEC's UNIX on an
Alpha. [0]

In addition there's a port to x86-64 Linux floating around that lets you run
it on top of a 2007-era Ubuntu in a VM [1]. There was also the MacIvory series
of expansion boards that were a LSI-based Symbolics machine that you could fit
in a Mac and run OpenGenera in a window.

Dave Schmidt at Symbolics was still selling hardware (a complete system could
be had for under a couple grand) up until a couple of years ago; last time I
contacted him he said hardware sales were now stopped so that what's remaining
can be used for service/support contracts.

I bought a Symbolics keyboard from him before that happened and wired up an
adapter using a Teensy to give it a USB interface.

I know of a company in College Station, TX that used a number of Symbolics
systems when they were new, and the owner refuses to get rid of them because
they cost so much new. A friend that worked there until recently ranted one
day that they were using one of the chassis as a stand for the coffee machine,
and I wanted to cry.

(disclaimer: I own/run
[http://www.lispmachine.net](http://www.lispmachine.net))

[0] [http://www.symbolics-dks.com/](http://www.symbolics-dks.com/)

[1] [http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux](http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux) [2]

[2] [http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2008/05/18/finally-got-
ope...](http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2008/05/18/finally-got-open-genera-
running/)

~~~
lispmachina
Check out #lispm on freenode for a current effort to bring a newer version of
VLM up on native Linux/FreeBSD.

~~~
akkadmed
Is it better than #lisp? Spending just half an hour in #lisp, and you see more
assholes than a Turkish Customs Agent.

------
Animats
Symbolics LISP machines were not really all that great to use. I used the
refrigerator-sized one briefly, but it was more trouble than it was worth. We
at Ford Aerospace switched over to Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work.

Symbolics, the company, made unreliable hardware. Too much wire wrap. 1983 was
late to be introducing a wire-wrapped CPU. The Sun 2 and the Symbolics 3600
both came out in 1983, but the Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine with a printed
circuit backplane and far less hand wiring, fixable by swapping boards.
Symbolics machines had to be fixed by on-site Symbolics repair people, and the
service was both poor and arrogant. This was at the height of the false AI
boom ("expert systems") of the 1980s, and some people (I could name names on
the Stanford faculty) were saying that strong AI was right around the corner.
For a while, Symbolics machines were corporate status symbols. When that
bubble popped, so did Symbolics.

Symbolics' original networking concept was that all machines would share some
huge memory address space, with shared memory over Ethernet. That never really
happened. They also really did have multi-hour garbage collections at first,
until they got the garbage collector and the virtual memory to understand each
other.

Most of those fancy buttons on the keyboard didn't do much of anything. SHIFT,
CTL, TOP, META, SUPER, and HYPER were all shift keys, so there were 64
possible shifts for each key, any of which could be bound in EMACS. This was
cool, but not useful.

Which is the verdict on the Symbolics machines - cool, but not useful.

~~~
lispm
> Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work.

The SUN 2 was a tiny machine in comparison. 1 MB RAM, 4 MB max. 16MB virtual
memory.

> Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine

The Symbolics 3600 was also a 680x0 machine. ;-) It used one as its frontend
processor.

> Symbolics' original networking concept was that all machines would share
> some huge memory address space, with shared memory over Ethernet.

That was never a part of the Symbolics operating system. Not sure where you
got that from.

> until they got the garbage collector and the virtual memory to understand
> each other.

Which SUN never got.

> Most of those fancy buttons on the keyboard didn't do much of anything.

Actually they did.

> SHIFT, CTL, TOP, META, SUPER, and HYPER were all shift keys, so there were
> 64 possible shifts for each key

There was a logical system behind it and different shift keys were used for
different purposes. Not all combinations were used. It's not too different
from any modern computer. My mac has command, option, control, fn, shift keys.
Five. The Symbolics keyboard had shift, control, meta, super, hyper. Five.

~~~
Animats
Early Symbolics 3600 machines had 256K words (36 bits) of memory. Later
machines doubled this. Early Sun 2 machines had 1MB of RAM. Later machines had
a minimum of 2MB, needed due to OS growth. So they were roughly comparable in
memory capacity.

~~~
lispm
I used a Symbolics 3600 much more memory, 4MWords IIRC. My own 3640 has
4MWord. A word was 36 bits wide.

> So they were roughly comparable in memory capacity.

Sure not: you could use a 3600 with 20 MB RAM and 150 MB virtual memory.

~~~
hga
In the preceding generation of CADR Lisp Machines built by the MIT-AI lab, I
seem to remember that half a megaword of 32 bit words was not uncommon, and at
least one had 2 megawords.

~~~
rjsw
The CADR could address 64MB of virtual memory, a fair bit more than a Sun-2.

~~~
hga
24 bits word addressed. The 25 bits for the LMI LAMBDA (a microcode hack that
no doubt incorporated the 2 space copying GC), and 28 bits for the Symbolics
3600 family. In all cases I'm pretty sure too little ^_^.

There were a lot of Moore's law skeptics back then....

------
mindcrime
I'm only just now starting to get on the Lisp bandwagon a bit... I've been
working my way through _Practical Common Lisp_ bit by bit (no pun intended)
and I have to say, I'm really liking this so far. I could see really getting
into Lisp in a big way.

But... could one of you guys who knew the Symbolics machines help me out with
something? What exactly made them so special, hardware wise? I mean, Lisp
seems to run just fine on Linux on x64 hardware now. What advantage does one
get from running Lisp on hardware which is custom tailored to it? Or would
that even make sense nowadays IF something like the Symbolics Lisp Machines
were still made?

~~~
deckard1
A Lisp Machine today would be an anachronism. Hardware type tagging could be
useful. But list efficiency and manipulation would likely be futile. Today,
cache is king. Which means, linked lists are out. CAR/CDR? Let's not.

The glory days were not that glorious. There are stories out there of runaway
garbage collections, that grinded on for _days_. Today you get garbage
collections in your web browser that would embarrass any Lisp Machine ever
built.

~~~
kazinator
> _Which means, linked lists are out. CAR /CDR? Let's not._

Data structures are dictated by the requirements of what you're doing, not the
machine. Linked lists are out? The C middleware that runs everything is full
of "struct foo { struct foo * next; int other_field ... }".

Linked lists benefit from caching, like other kinds of data.

> _Today you get garbage collections in your web browser that would embarrass
> any Lisp Machine ever built._

The garbage collection in your web browser is complete, utter garbage compared
to what Lisp people were doing 30-40 years ago. Sorry!

(I will add to this comment later; I have to go to Task Manager and kill the
web browser.)

~~~
physguy1123
> The garbage collection in your web browser is complete, utter garbage
> compared to what Lisp people were doing 30-40 years ago. Sorry!

Can you back that statement up? GC has advanced heavily over the years (and
still is).The first paper on generational GC was published in 1984, and I
would imagine that it has drastically improved since then. I don't think that
generational GC even landed in SBCL until sometime around 2005.

Without anything to back that up, your post just sounds like Lisp fanboyism.

~~~
lispm
You could read the chapters on memory management and GC in the Symbolics
Genera 8 manuals: areas, generations, resources, ephemeral GC, generational
copying GC, full GC, ...

[http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/s...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Internals.pdf)

------
beambot
I'm sure there are folks (archive.org?) who would love to help you make
digital copies of all those tapes for historical purposes...

------
Swayworn
I'm surprised a machine explicitly designed to write and run Lisp requires a
two-key combo to make a parenthesis.

~~~
hga
Look closely at the two keys to the right of "p", or this more clear picture
of a full fledged Space Cadet Keyboard: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-
cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-
cadet_keyboard#/media/File:Space-cadet.jpg)

------
kristianp
Did the Symbolics List Machines have Z80 processors in them? Or was it another
machine in the MIT labs you're talking about?

"...by someone who had hand-wrapped Z80 boards in the MIT AI labs at one
point".

------
catpolice
We use one of these in the lobby as a coffee table at my work.

~~~
lectrick
You don't happen to work in College Station, TX?

(Search the rest of the current discussion for "coffee machine" ;) )

~~~
catpolice
Texas yes, College Station no.

------
0xCMP
The text is horrible on this page. :(

