Notices by Weekend Editor (weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

@amszmidt

In my case, the diners were Japanese (firm opinions on rice) and Italian (firm opinions on pasta).

I *really* didn't think that through...

@amszmidt

I once made a basil risotto with orzo, which was deemed... a curious choice.

@amszmidt @pmidden

And NAMESPACE was DNS before *that* was invented, too.

@amszmidt @pmidden

Yes, we had internal clock chips on the 3600.

But they weren't very good! There was significant forward/backward drift in seconds as the days went by. And since those machines were reliable enough that they might not be booted for months, this was a problem.

One day, Doug Dodds (I think?) came up with a "solution". (Quotes because it worked for us, with a lot of lispms, but wouldn't work for a customer site with only 1 or 2.) It was to have the lisp machines all ask each other what time it was, and then set their clocks to the average of the result.

Some time chips were faster, some were slower, but it averaged out *quite* nicely.

I had a nice time explaining the Central Limit Theorem to some colleagues who wanted to know why it worked. :-)

@amszmidt @pmidden

The .bin file for the Symbolics L machines was reworked a couple times; this may have been changed with respect to the CADR/LM-2.

@amszmidt @pmidden

Network protocols are another matter, since they have to be understandable by a foreign machine of unknown architecture.

But as far as I recall (admittedly it's been many years), internal representations of time on Symbolics machines were all bignums.

Boxing/unboxing wasn't such an issue since the hardware had type tags and would handle a lot in microcode.

But, as I said, it's been 40+ years since I had to know this in any detail.

@pmidden

On Lisp Machines, and hence now in Common Lisp, time was typically measured in "universal time", i.e., time since 1900 in seconds.

It is an unbounded integer (bignum) for the same reason.

@thecorodon

My summary was: "Don't start a war of words with people whose profession is words."