[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

[Mark H. David]

Hi Robert,

I would like to correct one detail you have misremembered, and sorry for
the late reply. Gensym was not cratering around 1987.  I figure you
meant Lisp Machines, Inc.(LMI), which is understandable as most of the
founders of Gensym had worked together at LMI until mid-1986.
Regards,
-Mark



----- Original message -----
From: Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>
To: "Bruce O'Neel" <bruce.oneel at pckswarms.ch>
Cc: "R. Matthew Emerson" <rme at acm.org>, Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net>, "Openmcl-devel" <openmcl-devel at clozure.com>Subject: Re: [Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 10:20:37 -0500

I'm sure that MCL played a role, but I remember Symbolics and Gensym
cratering in about 1987 or soon after.  And I think that Sun, Apollo,
etc., general-purpose machines but not personal computers, were
substantially involved.  Lucid on a SPARCstation could give the
Symbolics a run for its money (although the development environment was
decidedly inferior).Cheers,
 R



On 22 Oct 2018, at 9:33, Bruce O'Neel wrote:


> 
> 
> 
> Hi
> 
> At a past job I used MCL on my Powerbook 540c upgraded to the
> underperforming PPC 603e running at 100mhz for personal development
> and experimentation.  Production was on TI Explorers.  My powerbook
> was about 2x faster than the Explorers until it ran out of memory.
> To be fairer to the Explorers this was about 10 years after they
> were made, but it wasn't like that 603e was winning any benchmark
> races either.> 
> cheers
> 
> bruce
> 
> *22 October 2018 06:31 Chris Hanson
> <cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:*>> As someone who’s studied their history, I seriously think that
>> CCL/MCL is an under-acknowledged participant in the death of Lisp
>> Machines: When you could use a Macintosh for development nearly as
>> effectively as a Lisp Machine for barely a tenth the cost (or even
>> less), and deploy on Macintosh as well, why spend all that money on
>> specialized hardware? Especially since by the 1990s the Lisp Machines
>> were falling far behind on performance.>> 
>> -- Chris 
>> 
>> > On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Ron Garret  wrote: 
>> > 
>> > " an intrepid band of hackers formed a little company called Coral
>> > Software. And Coral Common Lisp was their product that they managed
>> > to put together, and it came out in 1987, and … they had a Common
>> > Lisp (it didn’t have CLOS, so it was CLTL1), [which] ran on a 1MB
>> > Macintosh Plus, this incredibly weak hardware. So that was a real
>> > accomplishment.”>> > 
>> > Not only did they have a CL that ran on a 1MB Mac Plus, it had an
>> > IDE!  And not only did it have an IDE, it had one of the best IDEs
>> > ever.  You can still run it on emulators today, and it is still
>> > usable — even competitive — today.  It had an interactive interface
>> > builder that is still to this day superior to anything I have seen
>> > anywhere.  I still miss it.  (I used the original CCL to do my
>> > masters thesis back in 1987 and it spoiled me on IDEs for life.
>> > I’ve been a grumpy old man ever since.)>> > 
>> > I would rank the original CCL as a technical achievement on a par
>> > with the Macintosh itself.>> > 
>> > rg 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > On Oct 18, 2018, at 5:12 PM, R. Matthew Emerson  wrote: 
>> > 
>> >> I was invited to give a talk at this year’s European Lisp
>> >> Symposium in Marbella, Spain.  It was a great conference.  I
>> >> highly recommend that you try to attend next the next one if you
>> >> possibly can.  It will be in Genoa, Italy.  See
>> >> https://european-lisp-symposium.org.>> >> 
>> >> Anyway, I prepared a web site that contains a video of the talk
>> >> and also a written transcript with slides included in the text in
>> >> the appropriate places.>> >> 
>> >> The link is http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/ 
>> >> 
>> >> It’s not really very technical in nature (it’s meant to be
>> >> entertaining and encouraging), but maybe some of you would
>> >> enjoy it.>> >> 
>> >> 
>> >> _______________________________________________ 
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>> >> https://lists.clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel 
>> > 
>> > _______________________________________________ 
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>> 
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> 
> 
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