Notices by Weekend Editor (weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz), page 3

@amszmidt @gosha

Back in those days, bridges were often actual computers, like one of the smaller PDP-11s.

We were... learning. :-)

@gosha
@amszmidt
@splatt9990

Yes, that's more or less right. We used chaosnet at MIT, and that carried over to the lisp machines.

Chaosnet was a lot simpler to use, as I recall from the experince of writing network applications like 40 years ago.

IP-TCP was only just beginning to become popular in those days. We had chaosnet to IP-TCP bridges, basically routers that could speak either protocol. (And I have a hilarious story about an MIT network admin who didn't know the difference between a router & a bridge, and didn't know what a time-domain reflectometer was.)

Then around 1986 or so we had native IP-TCP on lisp machines.

Symbolics.com was in fact the first .com site on the internet.

@gosha

Does it help if you have an old bridge router from CHAOS to IP/TCP? :-)

@cstross

That one, to me, was one of the weaker SSR stories.

I very much _would_ like to read a story in which the SSR goes up against another con man, as skilled as he is, but evil.

The early stories in which he met Angelina in her sociopathic murderer stage are almost like that.

Being able to identify the good part of one's opponent, and cause them to cultivate that is almost a religious point with me. Slippery Jim could recognize and cultivate the good in Angelina, just as I the reader had to recognize the good in Slippery Jim. Handy symmetry, there.

@cstross

The Stainless Steel Rat Meets Donald Trump... that would surely work? One despicalble con man vs another largely admirable con man?

@amszmidt

I recall at the time estimating that Symbolics had a bit under half a million lines of code, maybe twice that if you include the "layered" products (Fortran, Pascal, C, Macsyma, Statice, Joshua, ...).

Doesn't seem like so much nowadays, when codebases that size are everywhere. (And less well debugged.)

@amszmidt

But if you call the dish "risotto", you've set up an expectation which is then violated.

As I said, I didn't think this one through properly.

@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."