>
>Actually, very little. Most of the AI researchers in the 70's/early
80's
>were working on one of the following:
>
>1. PDP-10's running a very advanced operating system such as TOPS-20,
What do you mean by "advanced"?
>2. Things such as the Symbolics LISP machine, specifically designed
for
> AI research and with all sorts of spiffy hardware features that
make
> it automatic to do some really nice things (such as actual
machine-level
> "objects" that aren't just locations in memory but are real data
types.
I HATE object oriented stuff. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At least in
C++, Java, and Visual Basic, which have been my only expoures to it.
>Unfortunately, now if you go to a CS department it's rare to see people
>using anything other than generic Unix boxes. This is a crying shame,
as
>Unix was a pretty poor choice of OS's in 1972 (when it was started) and
>on today's big computers it's a much, much poorer choice compared to
>all the OS's developed by advanced research groups in the 70's and
80's.
Well, would any "advanced" OS like TOPS be suitable for modern
machines? Anyone want to be the second Linus Torvalds?
>
>To get a feel of what life was like in a AI lab, you ought to read one
>(or both) of the following:
>
>_The Hacker's Dictionary_, compiled by Eric S. Raymond. (Yes, it is
mainly
>just the jargon file, but there's also essays by Raymond and others
which
>nicely illustrate the AI researcher's "state of mind" in the book.)
>
>_The UNIX-Hater's Handbook_, discusses many OS's developed in the 70's
>and 80's which are far superior to Unix, but never caught on because
they
>weren't "lowest-common-denominator" OS's.
Ironic that now it's the other way around -- we're pushing UNIX-like
stuff like Linux, BeOS and Rhapsody, against DOS, Windows, NT, and
MacOS
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Received on Mon Mar 16 1998 - 11:10:55 GMT