A late 1990s Symbolics brochure on 25 reasons to buy Genera. The very first reason hints at how different the compuring world was at the time: all objects can be shared among all processes.
www.symbolics-dks.comGenera-why-1
#symbolics
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Here is a promised Mirai 1.1 screenshot running in a VM on FreeBSD. #symbolics #izware #mirai #nichimen
@screwlisp Thought you would be interested in this.
On the ex-Symbolics employees mailing list somebody posted a link to a "history of the Lisp machine".
https://youtu.be/sV7C6Ezl35A?si=S4uh4-JXKC2_7lOR
It's kind of long and so I didn't watch the whole thing, but just skipped around a little bit. Somebody else who did watch it said,
'Fascinating exposition. Given his mispronunciations of "CADR" and "Macsyma", it's clear that he wasn't in the room where it happened, nor spoke to anyone who was. But I can't quarrel with his research or cause-and-effect analysis of both the industry as a whole and Symbolics in particular.'
The document preparation system of Symbolics Lisp Machines consisted of two main hypertext tools, the Concordia authoring environment and the Document Examiner documentation browser and delivery interface. These papers describe the tools.
Supporting Document Development with Concordia
https://archive.org/details/smbx-concordia-paper-1988
Document Examiner: delivery interface for hypertext documents
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/317426.317448
Internet ArchiveSupporting Document Development with Concordia : Symbolics : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveA paper on Symbolics Concordia by Janet H. Walker.Concordia integrates the facilities needed to create, revise, publish, distribute, and maintain very large...
Earn money working on open source software #oss! New project just posted: help make wrappers to connect Symbolics.jl to SymPy. $300 bounty. Information for signing up for the #SciML small grants program are contained in the link:
https://sciml.ai/small_grants/#create_wrapper_functions_to_sympy_for_symbolicsjl_300
https://communitymedia.video/w/968LULd4gdi98BRLBDQ37E #interview with #gopher @someodd #haskell #technology #podcast featuring some #lisp #symbolics #reminiscences
gopher://gopher.someodd.zip
https://www.someodd.zip
someodd starting points
Connection was a bit spotty so we talked over each other occasionally. I forgot to boost the show toot, so if you would like to boost here that would be appreciated.
Feedback about the interview and interviews generally are welcome and wanted here.
Replied to vintage screwlisp account
This conversation triggered a memory....
Back at #Symbolics the standard methodology was for everyone to periodically run the Load Patches command, until the "Wobblies" built a new "world load" image containing all the latest yummy goodness, at which point people could download that and the process would start over.
There was this constant tension between wanting to Load Patches, or (sys:load-patches), and potentially break your image and have to reboot vs getting behind what the latest source code actually implements.
But you didn't really want to reboot because it took a long time and sometimes was "fraught with peril" because you might end up in the "cold load stream" due to some low-level FEP (something like a BIOS) changes. (Not to mention there was something of a competition to see who's machine had the longest uptime.)
@weekend_editor might remember more details than I do, or can correct me if I got something wrong. 
LOL it's 2025 and I'm learning how to clear a line with VT100 escape codes. Reminds me of how amazed I was to see the bitmapped #Symbolics #LispM console and its mouse interface in 1984.
"The mix-in revolution: How an ice cream innovator in Somerville influenced Lisp pioneers at the MIT AI Lab—and made a lasting mark on programming."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/25/1111238/the-mix-in-revolution/
MIT Technology Review · The mix-in revolution
Continued thread
The Bitmap Font editor in #symbolics Genera, a #lispmachine
Hi there, had to move my account to symbolics@mastodon.social .
Replied in thread
@rat @nosrednayduj @kentpitman
https://archives.anonradio.net/202502190000_screwtape.mp3
#interview #lisp #lambdaMOO featuring nosrednA yduJ #harlequin #gensym #symbolics #LOTS #protests sharpsign one hour
thanks everyone!
yduJ adds her favourite MOO object is #6656 Time Display [Department of Numerology]
Replied in thread
Back in the 1980s, when my then-office-mate was developing the Japanese product for the Symbolics lisp machine, we had an electronic version of this.
It was a big pad, about 50cm x 50cm, with a stylus to pick out individual characters. This was for kanji; the hiragana and katakana were handled separately.
To watch him use it was amazing... and slow.
#symbolics #macivory 2 #lispmachine #lisp 40bit Lisp CPU
#adventofcode #adventofcode2024 Day 1 #CommonLisp
#Symbolics #Genera, #SBCL and #LispWorks on the new Mac mini
#lisp #commonlisp #lispworks #symbolics #lispmachine
Made the KR frame system from the UIMS Garnet for two Common Lisp implementations work: LispWorks 8 and Portable Genera. I used this version: https://github.com/ury-marshak/kr
Typical problem porting code:: the initial value for structure slots is undefined in CL. The code assumes NIL.
Attached a screenshot of the KR examples in Portable Genera, a Virtual Lisp Machine on an Apple Mac mini with M4 Pro.
Replied to Yaroslav Khnygin
@surabax 
What I find interesting in this Symbolics Genera retrospective by David Moon is the discussion of the origins and motivations behind the lack of kernel protection in the Lisp Machine environment and, more generally, in Lisp. These features emerged from social dynamics and values like the opennes of hacker culture as much as from engineering design decisions.