[r9550684]

unrelated to your point, Sonya keene's book is the only one I know that was authored and typeset using Symbolics's in-house publishing system Concordia. (besides symbolics documentation sets of course)

Concordia (and its display component document examiner) had a pretty novel hypertext approach to authoring. all the content was made up of individual notes, that you could link together either with explicit links, or implicit one-follows-the-other links. I don't know if that's how Sonya used it, but when I authored some documents using Concordia, I discovered that it was very easy to focus on addressing specific points in almost a throwaway fashion. write a note on some subject you want to address. if you don't like it, write another take on the same subject. now you have the option to put either note into the book flow, refine them in parallel, and defer editorial decisions to the very end. the process is very reminiscent of explorative programming in lisp, so in other words symbolics people figured out how to write books in the same way as they write their code. ultimate vertical integration.

[lispm]

"Lisp Lore: A Guide to Programming the Lisp Machine" by Bromley&Lamson was also written using Concordia AFAIK. The Symbolics documentation also has Jensen&Wirth "Pascal User Manual and Report" and Harbison & Steele, C: A Reference Manual.

[bmitc]

> Symbolics's in-house publishing system Concordia

What you describe regarding Concordia sounds very intriguing. I can search for information on Concordia, but do you have any goto references (books, papers, videos) on it that you'd recommend?

[lispm]

I once recorded a demo video, running Concordia on an actual Symbolics Lisp Machine.

https://vimeo.com/83886950

[amno]

Cool video, interesting. Looks though like a very complicated way of creating and entering the content, compared to just typing in a buffer with some markup language. When I saw the video first I thought it was just textual hyperlinks, sort of what we with clickable text in Emacs. Info and help-mode are Emacs apps that uses it quite heavy. But then I looked up Concordia on Wikipedia, and I see it has same ancestor as texinfo :).

But very interesting to see, I'll watch your other videos when I have more time, it is a bit of history. Thanks for recording them and uploading videos. Is that machine still alive and running, or did you record it on your Linux port?

[lispm]

One doesn't need to use the menus, one can use the keyboard commands. The UI provides several ways to interact: key commands, interactive command line and menus.

> I see it has same ancestor as texinfo

Genera comes with a Scribe-based markup language and formatter.

> Is that machine still alive and running, or did you record it on your Linux port?

I made this video years ago on Lisp Machine. The new emulator for the Mac & Linux is many times faster and runs silent on something like a MacBook... Thus it's ,uch more convenient to use that for a demo, unless the software does not run there. The emulator has its own native code format and, for example, lacks emulation of the console hardware (graphics hardware).

[amno]

> One doesn't need to use the menus, one can use the keyboard commands. The UI provides several ways to interact: key commands, interactive command line and menus. > Genera comes with a Scribe-based markup language and formatter.

You mean, the humanity has not gone too far away when it comes to computer-human interaction back from those days? :-). Just kidding; that sounds like they were quite modern back in 80's. I saw the other video on YT about their graphics software and hardware. While it looks relatively simple compared to modern image editors, modellers, fx and animation packages, it still feels like they had all the right ideas. What do you think put them out of the business? Just the economy or some other more technical reason?

> The new emulator for the Mac & Linux is many times faster and runs silent on something like a MacBook.

Yeah I saw another video, and saw "machdd" or something similar on the modeline somewhere, so I assumed you made it on a mac.

> lacks emulation of the console hardware (graphics hardware)

That explains why all the demos are black and white.

I don't have so much time to install and configure virtual machines and programs, but one beautiful day I'll try it, just for the curiosity; I have seen the repo on GH.

[lispm]

> What do you think put them out of the business? Just the economy or some other more technical reason?

The main reason was the end of the cold war and the end of the high-tech war. Means there were too few commercial customers. Where they had commercial customers (like the Graphics & Animation business), there was a disruption by other technology, like SGIs (RISC CPUs with powerful graphics accelerators) and also Windows NT. The graphics software was sold to Nichimen and ported to SGIs and Windows NT.

> That explains why all the demos are black and white.

All the Symbolics early consoles were black & white, so all the software was using b&w. Typically the machines had an additional color screen, then with an additional color graphics board. All driven by Lisp. But the megapixel color screens and graphics boards were very expensive. They also might have been too slow to use as an interactive console screen.

The emulator support graphics. It's X11 and one can use color graphics, but the graphics & animation software hasn't been ported to X11 AFAIK. It's just that the normal tools don't use color in their UI, though there were applications which used color.

> I have seen the repo on GH.

Don't expect too much. That's an old, unsupported emulator, which has a bunch of technical problems.

[p_l]

The issue with console hardware is that some applications use old code paths that directly call into the most basic framebuffer Symbolics Lisp Machines had, and that is not supported on X11 - thus said software doesn't work neither on OpenGenera, nor on UX400, UX1200, and NXP1000 physical lisp machines (all of which lack console hardware and use X11.

The only exception is AFAIK MacIvory, which has special subsystem that emulates console hardware on top of Macintosh toolbox calls done over Sun RPC.

[bmitc]

Thank you!

[r9550684]

I'm glad Rainer recommended his video, because I learned Concordia purely by word of mouth and exploration. There's a paper by Janet H. Walker, the principal on Document Examiner/Concordia for a hypertext convention https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/317426.317448, but it's more about DE.