Withington of Symbolics talks about #LispM hardware in 01991, just before #Symbolics died. #history #toread
on 02025-08-27#Lisp #history of #Symbolics, a mirror of #Weinreb’s blog post
on 02024-10-09#video of #Symbolics Genera by Kalman Reti. He explains that the objects that you print on the typescript have their characters linked to the original objects, so “presentation to command translators” can take the “presentations” of objects already printed in the typescript and “convert them into, you know, reasonable commands”, and things stop being “mouse sensitive” (sometimes just “sensitive”) when you’re “in the context of wanting” something they aren’t. That is, when the argument you’re currently providing to the command line is some other type of argument (in his example, an image (picture) rather than a command). He also demonstrates the “Peek utility program” which shows an auto-updating display of processes, filesystem connections, windows, or things like that, and invoking the debugger from a popup menu. He’s very excited about how Lisp Machine Lisp allows you to have 2-D subsets (by reference, sharing storage) of 2-D arrays, like Numpy slices, “displaced”.
on 02024-08-07#retrocomputing #history #video of #Symbolics #Lisp #3D #graphics. Probably from about 01987. Maybe a digitization of a 30' VHS tape made by Symbolics at the time with shitty elevator music. He’s interactively modeling of a little airplane.
To orient the 3-D axes, their negative sides are “marked with gaps”, and the Z-X plane is “marked with a triangle” (the Y axis being the normally vertical one, as in Minetest).
The original might have been higher resolution, because all the user interface text is illegible except in occasional zoom shots.
It takes about 4 frames at 30fps for each popup menu to fully draw, making the #UX a bit sluggish, and larger menus can take as long as 8 frames. Similarly, the little airplane model (with about 30 polygons) can only redraw about once every 4 frames, making interactive rotation clumsy.
Interesting choice called out at 6'28": the popup menu pops up with the mouse on top of the last choice, easing the task of repeating it. As IIRC is usual with Genera, the menus have black shadows, and the active menu item is highlighted by drawing a box around its text.
Object edges and points are highlighted by making them thicker; object faces are highlighted by filling them with black. Presumably at this point they didn’t have color.
It can import data from “Cattom [?], CATIA, and IGES formats”!
At 11'55” he’s enthusiastically explaining how Genera supports multitasking, as he demonstrates a somewhat Flash-like animation program called “S-Dynamics”.
At 14'44” he shows “a look at [the bird animation] on the color screen”, which implies that indeed the screen he's been looking at is monochrome.
At 18'28” he starts doing a UI demo on the color screen itself, which is even slower, probably because it uses 32-bit RGBA. There’s a sort of ribbon-like thing across the bottom with a hierarchical menu tree structure inside of it. Drawing a translucent gradient circle is demonstrated at 21'25” and takes over two seconds of computation!
At the end, he mentions being able to export to “any video format”: “PAL, NTSC, or HDTV”, and the first (satellite) HDTV broadcasts were in 01989, so this might have been at the very tail end of Symbolics, around 01990.
Oh, yes, at the very end it says it's “Copywrite [sic] 1989 Symbolics Inc.”.
on 02024-08-07