The writing in this post is superb. One of my favorite lines:
"Windows is the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems. Given what everyone got paid, and how many people were involved, you’d think it would be a lot more memorable."
As someone who spends a lot of time with Windows...yeah. But the post is really an amazing blend of technology and sentiment, kind of reminiscent of Neal Stephenson at his best. Makes me want to dust off my PDP-11 emulator and take another crack at Unix V6.
It's both beautiful writing, and beautiful screenshots. Something in me jumped for joy as I was scrolling, and I didn't even have most of those systems (went from a TRS-80 Model 1 to a Sanyo MBC-550 to a 386 running MS-DOS 6.22, and then on to a bunch of variants of Windows.)
The author deliberately used the term "LISP Machine", with all of the letters of Lisp capitalized, but that's an anachronism (and a fairly good shibboleth). When they were developed they ran Lisp Machine Lisp, not LISP. And as far as I know they never used the specific appellation "LISP Machines", where the word Lisp was written in all capitals but the word machines was not.
Edit: It's hard to distinguish someone's tone on the internet, but I did not intend to be captious or mean spirited. My point is that there are enough differences between LISP and Lisp Machine Lisp, a descendent of Maclisp, that the two are not interchangeable.
If LispMs are for monks or nuns, is ITS for sorcerers?
I especially liked how you could patch a running kernel, but only if you entered a specific keystroke sequence the right way the first time. If you muffed it, a flag got set and the system would disallow future attempts even if you got it right later. It's more like a puzzle in a text adventure than an OS security mechanism.
And, of course, the command shell was a machine code debugger, but that really wasn't hugely weird in itself.
"Windows is the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems. Given what everyone got paid, and how many people were involved, you’d think it would be a lot more memorable."
As someone who spends a lot of time with Windows...yeah. But the post is really an amazing blend of technology and sentiment, kind of reminiscent of Neal Stephenson at his best. Makes me want to dust off my PDP-11 emulator and take another crack at Unix V6.