SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO

For whatever reason I really enjoyed the Symbolics graphics and animations demo[0] linked in the article. I was born in the 90s and have constantly heard the narrative that technological progress is getting faster and faster, and that we're currently at the forefront. And then I see something like this. They had basically photoshop before I was even alive!? [0] [VIDEO]

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [LINK] "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" [VIDEO] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] "The Interlisp programming environment" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]

I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: [VIDEO]

See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: [LINK] [VIDEO] It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.

Good article I hadn't run across before; thanks for linking it. One interesting side story is the odd Symbolics foray into animation and video through the Symbolics Graphics Division, which afaict was reasonably successful for a few years. It seemed like the sort of application-oriented business that might let the Symbolics machines break out of single-purpose "AI machines" into being seen as general workstations, or at least dual-purpose AI/graphics workstations. But that business seems to have sort of evaporated along with the rest of their business, despite not being AI and there being no "graphics winter". Perhaps steamrollered by Silicon Graphics, and the same trends towards Unix and commodity CPUs? Or not marketed well enough, by a company whose public materials focused too exclusively on Lisp+AI? Some bits from that era: the S-Package 3d modeling/animation system ( [VIDEO] ), the PaintAmation package ( [LINK] ), and the first HDTV processing on a workstation ( [LINK] ).

There was never a really cheap Lispm. The 'cheap' ones were a Mac II + TI microexplorer or the Mac II + MacIvory. But developer workstations were always expensive - Lispm or not - or underpowered. What was also expensive was the software. I got a KEE license on a used machine I was given. I think it cost $50k. Similar Symbolics extensions for their OS could be extremely expensive. The graphics suite did cost several 10k per module (paint, model, render, tools, ...). > a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market Well, they could not live from developers alone. They were also looking for end users. Some of the machines were thought as delivery machines, cheaper and with less resources. There were also tools like 'firewall', which were supposed to keep users from getting in contact with the development environment (like debugger, ...). Actually Symbolics also targeted high-end endusers, both with hardware and with software. They had to go beyond government developers - to be able to sell machines/software. There were applications that were kind of development centric, like the iCAD cad system - where one could program 3d models via Flavors extensions. But one huge area for Symbolics was the graphics market. 2d, 2.5d animation, 3d animation, paint/model/render. Much of that was used without programming. The graphics suite was mostly targeted at graphics professionals, often doing 3d visualizations for TV, cinema and gam

> i use word count as the benchmark value Words are called 'symbols' in Lisp. Making extremely expressive domain level constructs is reducing the code size a lot in larger Lisp programs. > Lisp is not a particularly declarative type of language Just the opposite. Lisp is one of the major tools to write declarative code. The declarations are a part of the running system and can be queried&changed while the program is running. > Lisp ... all win contests for fewest characters, Most Lisp since the end 70s don't care about character count. Lisp usually uses very descriptive symbols as operator names. Lisp users invented machines with larger memory sizes in the late 70s, to get rid of limitations in code and data size. Paul Graham is favoring low-character count code, but this is not representative for general Lisp code, which favors low-symbol count code through expressive constructs. > understand this domain specific language without executing the code the languages will be documented and will be operators in the language. Other programming languages also create large vocabularities, but in different ways. Lisp makes it easy to integrate syntactic abstractions in the software, without the need to write external languages, which many other systems need to do. For example one can see the Common Lisp Object System as a domain-specific extension to write object-oriented code in Lisp. It's constructs are well documented and widely use in Lisp. > it/is firmly routed in the terminal/co

Genera on the Lisp Machine is very much an embodiment of this graphical command line (or rather just command) user interface. There's quite a lot to it. CLIM (and the open source McCLIM) is the current realisation of this. There's some documentation about 'Commands' in CLIM II here for example: [LINK] Commands are first class objects which live in command tables and which CLIM can look at to generate bits of UI and allow parameters to be specified. Central to this in CLIM is the idea of presentations - where domain objects are 'presented' onto the screen and the link to the domain object is maintained. That way you can invoke a command on that object in various ways, for example you can type a command name and then click a presented object which is acceptable as a parameter. The Symbolics S-packages used these concepts to make (I presume) powerful 3d modelling programs back in the day (I haven't used them): [VIDEO] - sorry for the poor video quality. [LINK] (lispm on here) sometimes posts interesting things about Genera