[varjag]

Figure you are John Morrison mentioned on that page then?

It's impressive how far ahead of mainstream computing the system appeared to be in 1980s. Wonder if there's any technology gap of that magnitude anywhere now: things seem to have levelled out.

[jmorrison]

I must confess to having a more cynical view than that. I dimly recall some quotation (I cannot recall enough of it to Google it successfully) about somebody being naked, covered in dirt, surrounded by flies, and thinking it's normal. I concur that it describes our current state of computing, and that opinion is based upon the contrast between the non-mainstream technology I've been privileged to use and mainstream technology that circumstances have (more or less) forced me to use.

It's 15 years beyond 2001 - where is my HAL-9000? There are thousands of times more computing power in my kids' cell phones [insert obligatory reference to cat pictures here] than the computer I shared with 20 other geeks at MIT. The hardware guys have done their jobs - we software guys (for reasons that are probably worth discussing) have not.

My hobby stuff ("it's a hobby until you get paid") is done in Common Lisp wherever possible.

[varjag]

Oddly so is mine, although I only caught the tail end of CL popularity in the 90s.

Being underwhelmed by software is quite common in the trade. Sometimes at the day job I contemplate why my embedded Linux system is able to run at 32 megs of memory and in 8Mb of flash footprint, while the "off the shelf" Linux server box to the side of it eats 600Mb RAM just to idle in one console. It almost feels as we are forced for the lack of depth in systems development to push into the width just to keep the machines busy.