[Openmcl-devel] “Prehistoric” MCL

Sat Mar 5 08:48:24 PST 2022

MCL had multithreading long before the OS had it:
It was a cooperative Multithreading build on stack-groups: the compiler 
inserted checks and task-switches; there existed run-reasons and 
arrest-reasons;
you could even adjust how gentle it should be in Multifinder regarding 
other applications (something like *eventloop-ticks-in-background* ? 
(Memory is Fading)
A remarkable piece of Software!
I started with 1.3 when it was delivered by Apple (1988?)
Last Version i bought was 4.2 (PPC i think)
I used fred (the editor) to implement a Software for a historian who had 
to analyse about 100 Interviews, each about 50 Pages. She had a 
hierarchical List of Topics regarding different aspects of the live of 
these persons and could assign these topics to pieces of these 
textdocuments and thanks to freds notion of buffer-marks, you could even 
edit the documents without destroing your marked "text-blocks" ; Finally 
an export of a really big Index showing reasons for Arrest, work, 
living, of the victims was created in rtf Format and used to Document 
the History of "Die Frauen von Hoheneck": A group of Woman arrested for 
being not Conform to DDR politics. The created material was used to 
write two Books: one for a historic correct analysation of the Topic (a 
German "Enquete-Kommission"), and a novel about theese People ("Die Spur 
der roten Sphinx"). I learned a lot about german and russian history 
during that work, because the historian was a really smart Person, and i 
learned a lot about using MCL to its limits.
It was really fun to develop in MCL, i never found a replacement :-/

Am 05.03.22 um 17:17 schrieb mikel evins:
> My memory is that the UI framework in Object Lisp and, later, CLOS, 
> was much easier and more convenient to work with than other ways of 
> building classic Mac user interfaces. One reason is that you could 
> build up a UI interactively in real time by evaluating Lisp 
> expressions at the Listener. After the transition to CLOS, you could 
> make a working window that responded appropriately to mouse events by 
> saying
>
>   (make-instance 'window)
>
> I don't remember the exact Object Lisp syntax, but it was similarly 
> simple.
>
> The Mac got threads in System 7, in the form of the Thread Manager. If 
> I remember right, MCL/CCL didn't get thread support until the OpenMCL 
> fork, though you could have used MCL's toolbox interface to talk to 
> the Thread Manager before that.
>
> Before OSX the Mac system was a cooperative multitasking system using 
> what is nowadays called green threads.
>
>> On Mar 5, 2022, at 1:18 AM, Tim McNerney <mc at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for pointers to the “digital orphans” web museums.
>> Which brings me back to my other question…
>> Some of us remember that building a “well behaved GUI” for the Mac 
>> was a pain to code.
>> Did ObjectLisp and successors make this any easier with their OOness?
>> Could I implement widgets that responded to mouse clicks “on their own,”
>> or was there always editing of the dreaded “main event loop” for each 
>> new widget?
>> Some examples, if handy, would be good fodder for conversation.
>> Lastly, when did MacOS get full-fledged threads?
>> Or, since I’m taking to MCL devs, when did CCL start supporting threads?
>>
>> --Tim
>>
>>> On Mar 4, 2022, at 13:23, Jeremy Jones <jaj at clozure.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>> Thanks Gene! They appear to have disk images of lots of old stuff.
>>>
>>> They even have MCL 1.3 (pre-CLOS)!
>>> https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-allegro-common-lisp
>>>
>>> I've been wanting to play with Object Lisp. A weekend project!
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 4, 2022, 11:37 AM Gene Z. Ragan <gene at semitone.audio> wrote:
>>>
>>>     The Macintosh Garden is a nice resource for classic software
>>>     releases.
>>>
>>>     https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-common-lisp-20
>>>     https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/pearl-lisp
>>>     https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-allegro-common-lisp
>>>     https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/xlisp
>>>
>>>     You may be able to find what you are looking for there.
>>>
>>>     Gene
>>>
>>>>     On Mar 3, 2022, at 10:26 PM, Tim McNerney <mc at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     Motivated by my recent purchase of a refurbished Mac Classic (*),
>>>>     I am searching for a couple of types of “prehistoric” software.
>>>>     1) 68000 MCL that runs in 4MB of RAM and a tiny B/W screen. (**)
>>>>     2) examples of early Mac apps written in MCL with decent UIs.
>>>>
>>>>     (*) With a BlueSCSI SSD instead of a fragile HDD.
>>>>
>>>>     Is the rumor true that Coral Software delivered a complete
>>>>     Common Lisp
>>>>     compressed onto a single 9cm floppy? (3 1/2”)
>>>>
>>>>     (**) I’m not looking for one of these physical floppies.
>>>>     9cm floppies were notorious, even brand new, of not being
>>>>     archival.
>>>>     Some sort of disk image would be better.
>>>>
>>>>     --Tim
>>>>     _______________________________________________
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>>>>     Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
>>>>     https://lists.clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel
>>>
>>>     _______________________________________________
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>>>
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