[LispM] First contact

[Raymond Wiker]

Francois-Rene Rideau writes:
 > 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:

	My name is Raymond Wiker. I've been programming in various
languages for quite some time now, but in the last 4 years or so I've
come to realise that what I *really* want to do is to program in
Lisp. 

	Having heard good things about Lisp Machines, I started
looking for a Symbolics Lisp Machine last summer. I wanted to minimise
the chances of hardware failures that would be hard to fix, so I
decided that I wanted either a MacIvory or an NXP1000. That way, I
wouldn't have to worry about ESDI disks or proprietary
monitors. MacIvories can also be shipped at alow cost and a minimal
chance of damage.

	It took me quite some time to find a suitable host machine,
but I ended up with a Quadra 950 with 100MB RAM and a 1GB SCSI
disk. (The disk is too small for serious use, so I'll have to replace
or supplement it some time soon.) A couple of weeks back I contacted
David Schmidt at Symbolics, and arranged to buy a MacIvory II with 24
MB of RAM and a Symbolics keyboard and mouse.

	The stuff I'd ordered arrived just a few days afterwards, and
since then I have been playing with the machine; mostly configuring it
and reading the online docs. I'm going to write down some of the
things I learnt about setting up a MacIvory from scratch; this should
hopefully be useful to others in the same situation.

	So far, my main observation is that, although the machine runs
at a measly 6 MHz (while my work machine is a Pentium III at 666 MHz),
it's not unbearably slow to work with. It does give me some
opportunity for getting up from my desk and doing something else for a
while, for example when doing an "optimize world" :-)

	//Raymond.

-- 
Raymond Wiker
Raymond.Wiker@fast.no