[b33j0r]

You point to a better timeline. Sometimes—when desperately alone—I imagine.

If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.

We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.

Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?

[hathawsh]

Sorry to break it to you, but on that timeline, the good things got poisoned. IBM enhanced Lisp with Enterprise Ready features like Spreadsheet Macro Builder, Microsoft took over development of Smalltalk and morphed it into BASIC 2.0, and the HURD community lost a bizarre copyright lawsuit. Fortunately for those folks, an intrepid hacker in the 90s saw some of the interesting ideas in MS-DOS and rebuilt it as LS-DOS. Today, most of their servers and mobile phones run LS-DOS or similar.

[__patchbit__]

LSD-OS would be an AI core unsupported by runtime and operating system that cascades streams of consciousness in a portable cartridge smartphone form factor until mounted on an embodiment to become unified and coherent.

[b33j0r]

Ah. A common (and understandable) misconception. LSD-OS doesn’t enhance anything in the UX, it just removes the filters that prevent you from seeing reality, man.

Some confuse this with LDS-OS, which makes the user weirdly and unquestionably `nice` by only accepting inputs from protected mode.

[qmr]

That's not at all how it went down.

Please don't spread lies about Gary.

[b33j0r]

For posterity, parent is correct. The “flying his plane” story is a memeified summary. I did not actually mean that we would have lisp machines otherwise, which was the tell that I was kidding.

For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal...

[otabdeveloper4]

> using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame

That future is not different from this future. That road leads down to Javascript and React anyways. (Perhaps with a slightly different syntax.)

[psychoslave]

Glad that at least we avoided that much more parentheses.

Where is our PL any kind of bracket and other rococo ornamental symbol is at most totally optional?

[rigonkulous]

sigh .. and SGI would've been the ones to make the killer laptop which morphed into a slick metal pocket dependency for billions ...