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by lgrapenthin 207 days ago
To me, it was never about the hardware. It was not even about LISP. It is about "clean design" and what a great computing environment was capable of, and still would be, had its potential not been shredded by the advent of cheap addicting hardware combined with an "operating system" so "simple and elegant" that even today, a program simply segfaults leaving you with nothing (instead of showing at least an inspectable stacktrace). So "simple and elegant" that the only two data formats end users are dealing with are "copy & paste text", "files", and "screenshots". An operating system so "pure" that every program lives in its own uninteroperable walled garden, that understands nothing about the environment and data loaded around it. We lost a whole computing world and it might still take ages getting that back.
2 comments

I don’t want an Open Genera machine in a portable case with a battery, though. I want Apple’s software to match the quality of their hardware.
Fun fact: NeXT's Interface Builder was originally built in Lisp. So Apple software was really good at one point, in part because someone wanted to bring the Lisp machine to the NeXT environment.
If you ship debug symbols with your binary, you do get a core dump with an inspectable stacktrace…