
Operating the Lisp Machine (1981) [pdf] - vezzy-fnord
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/Operating_the_Lisp_Machine.pdf
======
urbit
Most awesome paragraph:

 _One blinker is associated with the mouse: when you slide the mouse along a
surface, that blinker moves in a corresponding direction. When the mouse is
moved very rapidly, the mouse blinker gets big like Godzilla in order to
maintain visibility. Small children should be taken out of the room before
demonstrating this frightening feature._

More broadly, reading this manual made me realize (a) how many of the ideas of
the modern GUI probably were influenced by the Symbolics, and (b) how many
_more_ ideas 1981 had than today. The sense of freedom to do anything, try
anything, is all over the document.

~~~
hga
Oh, yes, the Godzilla mouse cursor was a great feature, and as I recall there
wasn't such on the Xerox Altos that were donated to MIT in ~1980. In those
days, pretty much anyone developing a window system was doing serious
innovation.

There was another big UI detail that's been somewhat lost, a "don't move the
text" default behavior you see with the less program. When I first visited
Western Digital, which was developing the 68000 engineering workstation that
LMI's first custom processor was going to run in back then in 1982, the people
developing the video were spending a lot of effort and budget on scrolling of
the bitmapped screen.

The MIT AI Lab's approach, initially out of necessity when they first did this
with a first generation PDP-11/20 and Intel 1103 first generation DRAMs
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_1103](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_1103)),
they just kept the text in place and moved the cursor, which can be confusing
in that new text is not automatically at the bottom, but is a lot easier to
skim and read than moving text.

------
tomknight
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.

~~~
unimpressive
No offense but, for a man of your stature I think I would like to see some
evidence that you're the _real_ Tom Knight before I take it at face value. :P

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
tomknight
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?

~~~
hga
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](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.)

------
delish
Page one describes the keyboard being completely reprogrammable:

 _The keyboard has unlimited rollover, meaning that a keystroke is sensed when
the key is depressed, no matter what other keys are depressed at the time._

 _Actually, the hardware can tell exactly what physical keys are being pressed
at any given moment: it knows when any key is depressed and when it is
released. This means that the Lisp Machine_ could* be programmed to interpret
the keyboard in any manner whatsoever: in this sense the keyboard is
completely "soft".*

It's refreshing reading an instruction manual for a computer that states the
reprogrammability of its keyboard. This is "what you get when you make the
hardware and software" taken further than Apple.

The manual then says the number of deviants from their defaults will be small:

 _But the Lisp Machine has already been programmed to interpret the keyboard
input in a useful way, and such reprogramming would be necessary only for the
most special needs._

Symbolics, I disagree. I (a regular programmer) have reprogrammed my
computer's keyboard to imitate parts of "programmer's dvorak." Because my
system is not as reprogrammable as a lisp machine, I must be aware of how my
BIOS, kernel, X11, and emacs are each interpreting my keyboard input. It was a
pain that would have been less on a lisp machine.

There are a lot of holes in my argument, though. My need for reprogrammability
was created by ThinkPad's, Linux', and emacs' design choices I disagree with.

~~~
ScottBurson
I reprogrammed the alphabetic layout on my Symbolics machine. It was easy. (I
use a custom layout I created myself, very similar to the Asset layout [0].)

Fortunately, there was no need to remap the Caps Lock key, which I am guessing
is the one that gave you the most trouble on the ThinkPad. It would have been
hopeless on the Symbolics; the key has a physical alternate-action mechanism,
like a ballpoint pen's. Here's a photo [1] taken with the key in the down
position. You can also see it's well out of the way; Rub Out (the key that
deleted the previous character; now generally labeled Backspace on PCs, or
Delete on Macs) is where God intended it, to the left of A. So you probably
wouldn't have had any desire to remap Caps Lock.

[0]
[http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/](http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/)

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Sy...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Symbolics-
keyboard.jpg/1920px-Symbolics-keyboard.jpg)

~~~
DonHopkins
At least it's still useful as CTRL-LOCK for Emacs.

I remember you had an awesome custom MINCE keyboard. Any old photos of that?

~~~
ScottBurson
No, and I scrapped that machine c. 1989. Wish I hadn't.

~~~
DonHopkins
I admired your keyboard because at the time, I had a custom keyboard on my own
Apple ][, which mapped the left and right "meta" keys to the game paddle
buttons.

I wrote a terminal emulator for it in FORTH that supported RMS and Devon's
SUPDUP line saving protocol (%TDSAV and %TDRES) which ITS EMACS could use to
stash lines away in a buffer before scrolling them off or writing over them,
and then restore them instantly when you scroll back! It was really great for
EMACSing at 1200 baud!

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/supdup.f](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/supdup.f)

~~~
eschaton
Mapping the paddle buttons to meta keys was such a good idea that Apple used
it on the Apple //e with the open-Apple and closed-Apple (eventually option)
keys. Was that a common thing for extended keyboards in the Apple ][ era?

~~~
DonHopkins
It was standard practice to wire the shift key to paddle button zero to get
upper/lower case when you had an 80-column card. But I used full ASCII
keyboard that supported upper and lower case, and had two extra buttons that
were easy to wire up to paddle buttons and use as modifiers.

"For lowercase input, since it was not possible to detect whether the
keyboard's Shift keys were in use, a modification called the "one-wire shift
key mod" connected the Shift key to one of the pins on the motherboard's
paddle connector. Compatible applications, including nearly all word
processors, could then detect whether the shift key was being pressed. This
modification, however, involved adding wires inside the Apple II, and was
therefore only popular among hobbyists. For this reason, most applications
that could support lower-case letters could also use the ESC key as a
substitute lowercase toggle if the "shift key mod" was not installed." \--
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus#Substitute_lower...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus#Substitute_lowercase_functionality)

------
eschaton
It's really a bummer that whoever it is who bought the Symbolics intellectual
property at probate* hasn't been more open about their plans for it or how
they will be opening it up to the world.

The Symbolics intellectual property doesn't have much direct value today;
their patents are all expired and licensing revenue can't be significant.
However it has a huge amount of historical value, and it would be amazing to
eventually have a runnable system available legally for free (rather than for
the thousands of dollars the VLM still costs) and to have on GitHub a complete
and accurate history of the code for the Genera operating system, the hardware
microcode and FEP/console code, and the various applications.

* It's rumored that the creator of CL-HTTP was the buyer. I was actually starting to look into purchasing it myself (with the intent of freeing it as much as possible, starting a project to get it on GitHub, etc.) when I found it had been bought.

------
delish
For anyone browsing mobiley who can't see the url, it's

[http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/L...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/Operating_the_Lisp_Machine.pdf)

so you can open folders as URLs and browse many interesting files.

edit: Even on desktop the URL is ellipses'd (what's the term for that?). It's
/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/Operating_the_Lisp_Machine.pdf. You can see how many
interesting topics there are...

~~~
thaumasiotes
> the URL is ellipses'd (what's the term for that?)

Ellipsed.

Weirdly, dictionary.cambridge.org, merriam-webster.com, and etymonline.com all
avow ignorance of this verb, but wiktionary knows it.
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ellipse#Verb](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ellipse#Verb)

~~~
fineIllregister
I thought it was "elided".

~~~
thaumasiotes
But the noun form of "elide" is "elision", whereas we want the verb for which
the noun form is "ellipsis".

------
DonHopkins
Here are some more Lisp Machine operating instructions:

Proposed Symbolics guidelines for mail messages

[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/flame-
manual.html](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/flame-manual.html)

------
agumonkey
And I just found this :

[https://youtu.be/IjmostrFetg](https://youtu.be/IjmostrFetg)

Thinking Machines parallel computer Fluid Dynamics demo, the Lisp OS and GUI
can be seen live half way. Pretty pretty.

------
gergles
If you can't picture the keyboard that would have been used, it is this one
(the "space cadet keyboard"):
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Space-
ca...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Space-cadet.jpg)

------
anentropic
I thought there would be more pictures

~~~
delish
Conjecture: I think this is online documentation, for an early definition of
"online"[0]: inside the machine, rather than on paper. That would explain the
sophisticated-for-the-time print quality, and lack of pictures. Symbolics and
LMI had, relative to Unix, pretty documentation.

Question for a knowledgeable someone: When was this published, and for what
audience? It says "for non-programmers," but that could be anyone.

[0] I first said "original" but remembered an earlier definition: when one's
town was accessible by train one was "online," meaning "on the line," where
line means rail.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_When was this published, and for what audience?_

Either 1981 or 1982.

Seems like it's part of some user manuals and promotional materials, so I'd
wager the intended audience was any party evaluating their technology.

~~~
delish
Man, I would not want to be them in 1981. I wrote in another thread on this
post that programmability ended up being valuable to me, but I certainly
didn't know its value when I got started with Linux and emacs.

I can only now articulate its value after seeing the limits of Linux' and
emacs' programmability.

