[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.

[amno]

> 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.

And now even SGI is out of business. It is a little bit unfortunate, but I think there is a history lesson to learn. Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Xerox, IBM, AT&T, they are all gone from the software business, more or less. I mean IBM, AT&T and Xerox are alive, but they are just a shadow of former self they once were, at least on the software front. Seems like all companies that target high-level industry with big profits, and ignores the consumer market are fading away.

Compare that to Microft which exploded in market share after their Dos/Windows and Intel which exploded after their 8086/8088. It just shows how important it is to put the technology out to consumers. Not because mass consumers will create so much value, they will that too of course, but foremost they will learn how to use the technology and once they come to businesses and have to solve problems, they will use it. I think that is a problem Symbolics faced. They run on dedicated hardware that probably was a multum in price and was used for specialized problems, while worse technology was cheaper and more accessible. People used what was accessible and when a generation grew up and went to work of course it is cheaper to let them use what they have learned then to buy specialized hardware and train them in specialized language. I think same thing happened to SGI when big graphics software names released their software for Windows. I think it is a circle, or a rolling stone. It is important to put the technology and knowledge out in the hands of people.

It is a bit sad that LW and Franz are keeping their software behind the locked gates instead of letting them out in the free. I bet some middle-tier manager is sitting at the Boeing as of this writing and trying to figure out how to save $$$ by cutting out that crazy expensive expert-knowledge Lisp thing out of their software stack, just to save some $$$ and get promotion or a bigger bonus.

If LW and Franz are going to survive and not go same way as Symbolics, Sun & Co, they should probably rethink their strategy of licensing their stuff free for GPL/non-commercial use, similar as Qt and some other companies do. Perhaps SBCL is good enough, but Lisp community needs more and better tools. In expert hands Emacs is s superb tool, but it is not the average mass tool.

It is a bit shame. I think Lisp is such a great tool for software engineering and applications development, but it is so underused because the knowledge pool is so small and the best tools are locked away behind the pricey tag seems like. If/when those two guys are gone, LW and Franz, Lisp will be seen even more as an academic exercise rather than a useful practical tool.

I don't know, perhaps I am wrong, just thinking loud.

[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.

[_19qg]

The MacIvory has the option to use a NuBUS color graphics card directly from Lisp: a NuVista board.

[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.