I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist
I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.
> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT
The whole point of Emacs is that it is a radically customizable platform, and if you don't like the behavior of some feature you can modify it yourself with a few lines of Lisp. Forking the whole project over a change to one obscure feature makes zero sense.
Status: Emacs user since it was implemented as TECO macros (1981 or so), but I don't use registers.
I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of.
What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better.
Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.
Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.
I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.
I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now.
Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be.
Don't think that's quite right, TOPS-20 was actually a fork of the Tenex code and so was pretty similar. Not sure what the relationship with TOPS-10 was.
Not really, I was more interested in hacking than coursework, so that's what I did. But I dropped back in some years later when the Media Lab started up, finished up my BS and got a couple of grad degrees.
I may be the only one here old enough to have worked on Tenex... around 1978 or so, I dropped out of MIT and went to work at BBN and did some extensions to Tenex / TOPS-20, including as I remember some device drivers for the IBM-style tape drives that were still in use.
Carl Sagan: Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? ... I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.
Spurious comparisons to Nazis are a favorite tactic of his -- he famously compared Obama to Hitler because they both had enthusiastic crowds for their speeches. It's a mystery to me why anybody takes this man seriously.
> One difference in philosophy of Lisp and Haskell is that the latter makes liberal use of many tiny functions that do one single task. This is known as composability, or the UNIX philosophy.
Have you ever looked at a Unix man page?
And while Common Lisp has some functions that might be swiss army knives of functionality, that is not "the philosophy of Lisp", it's a particular style. Clojure and Scheme are just as much Lisp as CL, and as other people have noted, their style is very similar to Haskell.