The history and anthropology of dark mode in the transition from the print era to the digital world, with a discussion of why dark mode is making a comeback with mobile devices.
Matthias Wiesmann reflects on how much computing used to be diverse over four decades ago. As an example he explains how weird the Commodore 64 was compared with modern systems.
The Medley site has an experimental mirror of the source tree https://interlisp.org/src (may change) where Interlisp sources and TEdit files are available as PDFs, with the former prettyprinted and syntax highlighted.
A nice feature is bitmaps in Interlisp files are rendered as actual bitmaps like in this snippet of an address book program:
A young developer who never used Windows 98 back in the day stumbled upon an introductory book on the operating system and posted his impressions on skimming it, which brought him joy. He wrote:
"I was also left with the impression that perhaps I would like more software to come with a physical manual."
In this interview Charles Simonyi told the origin of the acronym WYSIWYG in the context of his work at Xerox PARC on the Bravo word processor, see page 21:
I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.
I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.
The history of corporate presentations from film slides to PowerPoint. Back in the day we all did our fair share of presentations, but likely with far less fancy film slide equipment.
In this 1994 paper Richard Waters acknowledged the momentum of C and its implications for the Lisp ecosystem. He laid out a stretegy for the survival and growth of Lisp focused on the development of a critical mass of reusable software.
Three decades later the Lisp community has come a long way but, as Waters concluded back then:
"As long as we are a vibrant community [...] Lisp will hold its own."
I know, Git is a mess. But, since we're stuck with it, we may as well try to learn how it works with resources like this, which aims to lead to some form of Git enlightenment.
My git workflow is minimalist and defensive. I know the fewest possible commands to get my work done, and I work defensively, so I merge and push my feature branch work upstream before merging in the latest. If things go sideways, all I have to do is nuke the folder and try again. I commit as little brain real-estate possible to Git and give it as few opportunities to fuck up my life as possible.
👆 I posted the initial code and some notes on Insphex, a new hex dump tool in Common Lisp I'm writing under the Medley Interlisp environment. The program is similar to the Linux command hexdump.