Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
patrickdomanico.com88 points by pamoroso 2 days ago
88 points by pamoroso 2 days ago
If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS:
https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html
As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolute best talent in the entire country, and unified them towards a goal of pure exploratory research with no market pressure, with all the excesses of 1980s Japan.
FGCS: the Fifth-Generation Computing System
I was really excited about this initiative at the time, just starting my computer science undergrad degree.
Hardware that ran Prolog as close to bare metal as possible.
Thanks for the reminder. 40 years ago.
A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.
Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote:
"If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan:
- enter a market
- become a monopoly
- use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality"
A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising.
0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
> use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality
But why would a corporation do that when it could simply distribute those profits to shareholders?
Unless mandated, why would the people controlling a corporation (and its budget) do that? While the corp has money in the bank, it's kinda their money, in the sense that they decide what to spend it on. If distributed back to the shareholders, the money evaporates from their perspective, so there's not much incentive to do it unless it's required, or unless they will benefit by it (e.g., they have a lot of stock themselves and would like the dividend).
Corporations that have gone public are essentially lost causes. CEOs are incentivized to maximize shareholder profits at all costs, and it's much easier and cheaper to enshittify than to research and develop.
I suppose it's possible for privately owned corporations to be awesome. If the guy in charge cares, awesome things will happen. Valve is the only concrete example that comes to mind.
I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine, ran InterLisp-D on it for about two years, then slowed it down by installing Common Lisp on it.
Wonderful for Larry et.,al. to keep it going as open source.
Getting "too many requests" at the moment.
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