[LispM] First contact

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Amateurs of Lisp Machines,
   there are now a dozen of us have subscribed to this list,
and since no one dares talk first, I thought maybe I should.
I suggest we shortly present ourselves a bit,
and explain our experience with Lisp Machines:
ho are we? what Lisp Machines do we have or did we use?
What are we doing with them? What do we love or hate about them?

It's been some time since I've wanted to build an OS that be in symbiosis
with a high-level language (unlike these kluge of low-level C-based OSes).
I became aware of the existence and importance of lisp machines
while reading the lispos mailing-list (archived around
	http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/lispos
) and decided to eventually get to use one.
Since it seems very difficult to find one in France,
I finally bought one (a MacIvory 2) in the States,
and could test it by remote X sessions;
but even reading the documentation is painful through it,
so I'm in the process of acquiring a MacIvory 3 in Europe.
[I also crash the Genera interface when opening two simultaneous sessions
then closing one]. So I'm not doing much with Lisp machines at the moment,
but I'm very interested in doing more.

Questions:
1) some crucial characters like ~#{[|`\^@]} are not accessible to
Genera with my french keyboard mapping (they normally require the AltGr
modifier, but AltGr is mapped to SYMBOL or so to Genera). Can anyone suggest
a fix, or the right fscking manual to read?

2) would any of you have some extra Chine Nual or other books on
LISP machines of old?

May the LAMBDA be with you,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Reality must take precedence over public relations,
for Mother Nature cannot be fooled.
		-- R.P. Feynman