

Awesome UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines - akheron
http://lispm.dyndns.org/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples.html

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swombat
Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection,
perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like
there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.

~~~
brlewis
There's even mine written primarily in Scheme, apropos to these images:
<http://ourdoings.com/>

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cpr
Boy, that brought back happy memories!

I was running the MIT-EECS department computing machinery back when Symbolics
and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc--Greenblatt's competitor) were just getting going,
and we had around 8 or 10 of the original LispMs for undergrads to use, wire-
wrapped and all. Even those, as slow as they were, were impressive machines
for the time, given the 'turtles all the way' down architecture. (Everything
written in Lisp, except the microcode.)

Back then, we were using MIT's CHAOSnet, a home-grown competitor to PARC's
original 3Mb Ethernet. Unhappy memories of big fat yellow coax everywhere,
easily dented. We used a TDR a lot to find kinks in the cable when the network
wasn't working well.

The LispMs were years ahead of their time in terms of sheer architectural
genius, but were also incredibly baroque--many brilliant hackers adding
ornament upon ornament for years...

------
smartrevolution
Rainer Joswig (the guy who hosts the screenshots) did live demos with his
machines at the "5. Hamburg Lispers Meeting" in 2008 at my company's office.
Here are some photos of the machines and the event
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/srichter/sets/72157605318306397/)

The SLIME REPL is very much modeled after the Symbolics REPL. I guess Rainer
can tell more about that. Check out the videos on his main site (sorry Rainer,
this may increase traffic again. :) ). The most amazing part of his demo for
me was, when he inspected a running Lisp process, changed the code and
continued from there. The OS is (almost) completely written in Lisp, too...

------
unwind
Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various
hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces
were like, this certainly piqued my interest.

However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in
someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for
bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.

~~~
lispm
Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for
Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the
traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few
persons - so the average traffic is not really high.

~~~
Natsu
You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if
more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do
with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine
even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't
laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone
brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at
trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not....

Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting
them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to
mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no
site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss
feed checking.' bit at the bottom.

~~~
gwern
You are suggesting that he give screenshots of copyrighted software a CC
license? ....Right.

~~~
gnok
How is that different from say, a CC licensed photograph of a car or an
iPhone?

~~~
gwern
I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for
your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better
than this.

\---

A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a
physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software
UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them _are_.

Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just
magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the
fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book?
Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An
amazing discovery!)

Tell me, do you and all your upvoters think you know better than Wikimedia
Commons when it writes
(<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots>) :

> Screenshots are subject to the copyright of the displayed work, may it be a
> video, television program, or a computer program.

Do you think you know better than the librarian who wrote
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jiscleg...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/copyrightalexmorrisson.htm)
? Or how about <http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809> or
[http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-
publishing...](http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing-
screenshots-fair-use) or any of a dozen links you could have found in seconds
googling 'copyright screenshot'? Notice the only question is whether fair use
will defend you when you infringe on copyright by making screenshots and _not_
whether screenshots are copyrighted at all, because they are copyrighted.

Do you, in fact, have the slightest argument besides a specious analogy?

~~~
gnok
I apologize if my question came off as presumptuous and/or snarky. My question
was genuine. I assumed from the up-votes that my question's underlying basis
was indeed correct.

Clearly, taking a photograph of an art work does not automatically create a
copyright free version of the art. Nor does scanning a book.

Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not
the focus of the image _might_ likely classify as fair use, I assume?

Modders, please upvote parent and downmod my previous comment.

~~~
gwern
> Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not
> the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?

It might, but there you are getting into vagaries of fair use. Dialogue,
music, trademarked goods - all these things can creep into a video or a
photograph and taint it with derivativeness. (Is there a trademarked Coca-Cola
prominent in your photograph? You may be in trouble. Is there a TV in the
corner playing _The Simpsons_? Lessig gives an example where copyright-
clearing a few seconds of that TV crippled a documentary.)

For example, a sculpture is copyrighted and photographs thereof derivatives &
copyrighted, _except_ in Germany which has specially granted the photographer
protection: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama>

Is there a nifty Apple-designed good _cough_ iPhone _cough_ in the picture in
question? Now you have to worry about
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_right>

Did you know _buildings_ are copyrighted?
<http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/ip_photography.htm#1.6>
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_the_United_States)

~~~
Natsu
Your point is well-taken, but I think that Symbolics is now defunct? Granted,
the copyrights don't vanish, but who knows where they transferred to, if
anywhere.

~~~
gwern
To <http://www.symbolics-dks.com/>

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aristidb
Even people with the most superficial interest in Lisp will love to see
screenshots, especially if they are described as awesome.

If they can.

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mrbill
I recently bought a MacIvory II board set with docs and install media and am
awaiting the arrival of parts for the Quadra 700 that I'm going to host it in.
I've got a Symbolics "fat" old-style keyboard that I'm going to make the USB
adapter for, and then use that to run Genera over X on the LAN.

~~~
lispm
That works, but you should keep your MacIvory at arms length. The debugger
will often pop up on the main console and not the X11 window Console.

------
lispm
The link to the screenshots has been posted several times before. This time I
see a lot of requests for the screenshots coming in and it still goes on after
three days.

Any idea what is causing this?

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davidcollantes
You are certainly redefining "awesome" on this quasi-sensationalist
submission.

Please host the screenshots somewhere decent (not on your home machine) and
use a proper title ("UI screenshots from applications running on Symbolics
List Machines" should suffice).

I want to keep believing HN != Digg.

~~~
ptomato
Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted
the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine
certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.

