amoroso

amoroso, 4 days ago to retrocomputing

My weekend reading is the story of Don Estridge, the manager who led the development of the IBM 5150 computer better known as the PC:

https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-misfit-who-built-the-ibm-pc

#retrocomputing #ibmpc #ibm

amoroso, 8 days ago to retrocomputing

Some old but fascinating notes on the history of window systems by David Rosenthal, who worked on X-Windows and NeWS.

The post starts by commenting some remarks by Alan Kay on browser architecture and goes from there, discussing the work of other pioneers and their own comments. It covers display PostScript and other interesting system design ideas.

https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html

#retrocomputing #WindowSystem #gui

amoroso, 9 days ago to Lisp

This is the year of the Lisp Machine desktop.

Here's an online Medley Interlisp session on my Chromebox. Your turn: show off your Lisp Machine environment.

#interlisp #lisp #LispMachine

amoroso, 8 days ago to random

I wonder how difficult would it be for newcomers to grok Lisp parentheses if they weren't implicitly supposed to find parentheses hard due to all the fuss and cliches around them.

As a complete Lisp newbie over three decades ago, to me parentheses "disappeared" within minutes of using my first Lisp environment, TI PC-Scheme, and have never been an issue since then.

amoroso, 11 days ago to retrocomputing

This short history of web development is a useful overview for me as I haven't kept close tabs on the field. The post seems to cover all the main frameworks but a notable omission is Tailwind CSS.

https://gebna.gg/blog/brief-history-of-web-development

#retrocomputing #WebDev

amoroso, 12 days ago to random

This post is quite old but extremely interesting. It describes a 6502 assembler in Common Lisp for the NES game console.

The assembler has a Lispy design, which for example features lazy evaluttion for forward references and mini languages for control structures and audio output.

https://ahefner.livejournal.com/20528.html

The code is here:

https://github.com/ahefner/asm6502/blob/master/assembler.lisp

#mos6502 #CommonLisp #assembly

amoroso, 14 days ago to Lisp

I built a GUI for Insphex, my hex dump tool for Medley. This Common Lisp program calls Interlisp's window and menu facilities to send the output to a window with a command toolbar.

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/building-a-gui-for-insphex

#interlisp #CommonLisp #lisp

amoroso, 15 days ago to Astronomy

In this villa near Florence, Italy, Galileo Galilei spent the last decade or so of his life under house arrest. I was there this weekend on the panel of a science outreach event, here's the video recording in Italian:

https://www.caffescienza.it/programma-2023-2024/la-luna-da-galileo-ad-artemis

#galilei #astronomy #florence

amoroso, 17 days ago to random

A list of compiler optimizations with descriptions and code snippets.

The entries are concise, clear, and with short, easy to understand snippets. A great example of algorithm documentation.

https://compileroptimizations.com/index.html

#compilers #ProgLang

amoroso, 18 days ago to VintageOSes

Confession of an Amiga enthusiast back in the day: I always liked the black and white hires mode of the Atari ST, which to me looked slicker than even the original Macintosh. And I still love that "printed page" experience of environments like Medley Interlisp.

#AtariST #retrocomputing #interlisp

amoroso, 21 days ago to retrocomputing

Matthias Wiesmann reflects on how much computing used to be diverse over four decades ago. As an example he explains how weird the Commodore 64 was compared with modern systems.

https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/37378

#retrocomputing #commodore64

amoroso, 23 days ago to VintageOSes

A young developer who never used Windows 98 back in the day stumbled upon an introductory book on the operating system and posted his impressions on skimming it, which brought him joy. He wrote:

"I was also left with the impression that perhaps I would like more software to come with a physical manual."

https://jamesg.blog/2024/05/19/windows-98-manual

#windows98 #documentation #retrocomputing

amoroso, 23 days ago to retrocomputing

In this interview Charles Simonyi told the origin of the acronym WYSIWYG in the context of his work at Xerox PARC on the Bravo word processor, see page 21:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/06/102702232-05-01-acc.pdf#page=21

Xerox Star ads such as this might have been inspired by the anecdote Simonyi told:

https://interface-experience.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IE-Star-2.jpg

From here:

https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-information-system/

By the way, it's an interesting 2008 interview Grady Booch did with Simonyi for a Computer History Museum oral history project.

#WYSIWYG #retrocomputing #xerox

amoroso, 24 days ago to random

Rate my Lisp Machine setup and share yours.

Medley Online session on an Intel i7 1.8 GHz ASUS Chromebox 3 with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB storage.

#interlisp #LispMachine #ChromeOS

A wooden desk with a black keyboard, a black mouse, and a flat LCD monitor with a black webcam on top, The screen shows the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and some windows with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. At the left of the desk can be partly seen a wooden bookcase with two shelves. On the bottom shelf are a black computer with a mini PC form factor and a white and gray smart speaker.

amoroso, 25 days ago to Lisp

I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.

https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/

#lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 26 days ago to Lisp

I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.

https://dl.acm.org/loi/sigplan-lisppointers

#lisp #CommonLisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 28 days ago to Lisp

In this 1994 paper Richard Waters acknowledged the momentum of C and its implications for the Lisp ecosystem. He laid out a stretegy for the survival and growth of Lisp focused on the development of a critical mass of reusable software.

Three decades later the Lisp community has come a long way but, as Waters concluded back then:

"As long as we are a vibrant community [...] Lisp will hold its own."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/192590.192600

#lisp #CommonLisp #scheme

amoroso, 29 days ago to random

I know, Git is a mess. But, since we're stuck with it, we may as well try to learn how it works with resources like this, which aims to lead to some form of Git enlightenment.

https://think-like-a-git.net

#git #VersionControl

amoroso, 1 month ago to Lisp

A sneak peek at a Common Lisp program I'm writing on Medley. Figuring what the program does is left as an exercise.

#interlisp #CommonLisp #lisp

amoroso, 1 month ago to retrocomputing

It's now available the paper of the Medley talk Andrew Sengul gave at the European Lisp Symposium 2024. It outlines the history of Interlisp, introduces the Medley revival project, and presents the main features and facilities of the environment.

The Medley Interlisp Revival
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11090093

#interlisp #els #retrocomputing

amoroso, 1 month ago to emacs

The rootwork v0.2 blog posted about the author's journey through text editors, from classics such as vi(m) and Emacs to tools I've never heard of. They explain what they use the editors for and why.

https://write.as/hobbsc/wandering-words-on-text-editors

#TextEditor #emacs #vi

amoroso, 1 month ago to random

This old paper tells the history of early Intel CPUs and discusses their features and major design decisions: the 8008, 8080, 8085, and 8086. The paper provides interesting technical and historical tidbits, such as the reason why the 8008 was little endian and hence later CPUs.

https://www.stevemorse.org/8086history/8086history.pdf

#x86 #intel8080 #assembly

amoroso, 1 month ago to Lisp

Are you going to European Lisp Symposium 2024?

I have a favor to ask you. Please tell the Lispers there if any of them writes a Common Lisp book I'll be more than happy to buy it, back a kickstarter, spread the voice, and support the author any way I can.

This is just one data point but my hunch is many Lispers are like me.

#els2024 #els #CommonLisp #lisp

amoroso, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to space

These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:

• NASA: @nasa 71K followers
• ESA: @esa 1.4K followers

There's an unfulfilled demand for public institutions to communicate on open and independent platforms.

#nasa #esa #space #mastodon #fediverse

amoroso, 1 month ago to Lisp

Common Lisp Quick Reference is a nicely designed, comprehensive, and handy Common Lisp cheatsheet. It's available in different PDF versions for printing as a booklet or online browsing, as well as LaTeX source.

http://clqr.boundp.org

#CommonLisp #lisp #cheatsheet