Symbolics ( Was: GUI & ex11 (CLIM) )

[Michael Fogeborg]

Here is a paper on Symbolics Inc. discussing what happened and why... ? !
Is it possible to learn from history ?

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Symbolics.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/projects_whole.html


At 08:07 25.02.2003 -0800, Jay Nelson wrote:
> From the site Luke pointed to:
>
> > A pioneering system which uses these ideas was Dynamic
> > Windows, the high-level window system of Genera, the
> > operating system of the Symbolics Lisp Machine. The first
> > versions of Dynamic Windows appeared with Genera 7.0 in
> > 1986 [19]. Presentations have been used for the Lisp program
> > development environment and for a command processor (nowadays
> > called shell). A command like Show Directory host:>dir>*.lisp
> > prints file information into a window. When,
> > afterwards, a command Compile File is given, all
> > the Lisp files are mouse-sensitive and can be
> > clicked on. It is also possible to directly click
> > onto the file name and select, for instance, Edit
> > File via a pop-up menu.
>
>Oh, how I miss my old Symbolics machine!
>Presentations were the cat's meow -- you would
>"present" an object to the scrolling history of
>the window display and it was magically mouseable.
>#<OBJECT #x87465905> would let you pop up a menu,
>change a instance variable, commit and continue.
>Sweet.
>
>We would leave our machines on without
>rebooting until we ran out of memory, so you could
>scroll back in a window and pull out an instance
>of an object you presented a month ago -- disassemble
>it to get the code again -- and grindf it into the
>edit buffer.  Or just pull down a menu, hit suspend,
>snatch the source code for the OS from the interpreter,
>hit resume and paste it into your edit buffer to mimic
>the OS menus.
>
>And what is Emacs without a Hyper and Super key?!
>
> > Pictures of Symbolics machines can be found at here.
>
>Uh, oh.  Not even a museum piece left?  How sad.  It will be 20
>years before we rediscover the ability that Symbolics had 20 years
>ago.
>
>jay
>