[GTALUG] One of the First Computer TV shows from the 80s.

[Ian Garmaise]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:53 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
>

> I was very impressed by the outright competence they displayed.
>
> What bothers me is that such competence was not enough to get world
> dominance.

Which brings me to where I'm at now, helping to turn innovations
into profitable businesses that hopefully will employ Canadians.

LCSI was successful to the extent that they created world-class
technology and products
sold all over the world, and employed quite a few people in Montreal
who have gone on to
interesting careers and in some cases started successful companies.

The thing which hurt LCSI was the change in pedagogy as it related to computers,
i.e. schools for a time lost interest in teaching students how to
program.  Also, our close
alliance with Apple was hurt when they discontinued the Apple //e/gs
etc.  The Macs for a long
time were too expensive for schools.  It took a while until schools
could afford computers powerful
enough to run something like Microworlds.
>
> Kind of like the Logo project in general.  There are so many things
> right about Logo and yet is has kind of disappeared.
>
> - The Consutructivist foundation of the project is a compelling idea.
>
> - the fact that there was actually a well thought out philosophical
>   underpinning ought to have made a big difference.
>
> - there was a lot of supporting literature.  For example, Brian
>   Harvey's books (for the technically inclined).  But lots of
>   pedagogical material too.  And lots of gateway documentation.
>
> - the beautiful simplicity and power of the language
>
> - the brilliant minds behind it (eg. MIT and BBN).
>
> - the turtle!  Great in so many ways.
>
> - The austerity might have been a problem but Microworlds removed that block.
>
> - logo implementations widely available.  For example, Brian Harvey's
>   UCBlogo is open source and runs on Linux (and Windows, and ...)

All good points.  A lot of good opportunities were missed but I see
positive signs now
(e.g. the the new British curriculum for computers).

>

> Wow.  I didn't know that anything practical had been done with lisp
> machines.  I also didn't know that anyone without deep corporate
> pockets bought them.  They seemed a part of the first AI boom/crash.

They weren't cheap, and not cheap to maintain either.  We had
significant investor
support, otherwise we never could have had them.  The productivity of
those systems
was second to none, the cross-assemblers and symbolic debuggers were terrific.
I remember that the 8088 assembler was two pages of lisp.

Here's what's more amazing, after a while, as you know, the Lisp machine
industry fell apart (I myself had gone down to Boston to figure out
what was going on,
on which trip, where I visited LMI in Cambridge and Andover, I nearly
ran into Stallman
at the point of his total disillusionment with the Lisp machine drama
and the start of his Gnu adventure).
I did meet Richard Greenblatt, co-designer of the Lisp machine, and
reputed to be one of the greatest hackers
of all time. Didn't really know who he was at the time, he was kind of
in the background.

So, no more Lisp machines.  So we implemented Lisp on the //gs (4 MB
ram) and carried on as before,
except that the development machines cost less then 1% of what their
predecessors did.

> Yeah.  I don't even know what the memory requirement was but you could
> not use more than 48k of RAM on the Atari 800 (the system itself was
> in a ROM cartridge, possibly bank-switched).  That's fairly tight for
> logo -- assembly code would seem mandatory on those
> horrible-for-compilers 8-bit architectures.
>

Definitely assembly was the only way to go for 6502 platforms,
even when more memory was available (//e, etc.)
Fortunately we were pretty good at it :)
Brian pretty much knew all the opcodes by heart.

-- 
=====
Ian Garmaise
Consultant
Phorix Solutions Group
ian.g at phorixsol.com
Skype: iantor
Toronto cell: 416.432.2251
NYC: 917.512.9535

http://www.PhorixSol.com