The PERQ factor (was: One-upsmanship) (fwd)

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_eskimo.com>
Date: Sun Apr 21 12:00:33 2002

I sent you a personal mesasge and then you replied to the list... either
your mail server is "smart" (fills in To: automatically) or you did some
extra typing. *grumble* *mutter* So we might as well bring the discussion
back to the list (i.e., yes, I realize I'm replying to the list this time).

On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 07:52:02AM -0700, Peter C. Wallace wrote:

> > The design of both the software and the hardware strikes me as baroque
> > (typical MIT "just keep adding features" hacking). Also the system as a

> I dont think that there was a whole lot there that was not needed. A
> tagged architecture 36 bit machine with paged virtual memory, ECC, capable of
> executing about 5 million Lisp instructions a second was not trivial to build
> in 1985...

I'm not convinced. I'm not saying it was trivial, I'm saying it seems
to have evolved more than being designed from the ground up. Come on,
look at the keyboard. And the software is still baroque. Powerful,
but baroque.

> You can download a Interlisp/common lisp environment from PARC that will run
> under Linux (its actually an application (LFG)) but you can play with SEdit
> and Tedit) ...

Do you have a URL?

-- Derek
Received on Sun Apr 21 2002 - 12:00:33 BST