LispOS directly on hardware or on Unix kernel?

[Henry G. Baker]

> Yes, but, one of the main reasons of Symbolics death (apart
> from shortsighted management), was that NO application was
> available on it !  Yes, a great development environment, but
> not even a single spreadsheet to do your counts. Not a word
> processor unless you bought Concordia.

SMBX _did_ have a spreadsheet in Lisp which was used extensively
within the company.  I think that it was done by exactly 1 person, and
it may have even been one of his first real programs.  It started out
a bit on the slow side (I think he got carried away, and made every
single cell a separate window!), but got speeded up as time went on.
It had some neat features, including the use of bignums for neat
number theory hacks!  There was some plan to interface it to Macsyma
to make a macsyma spreadsheet with formulae.  I have no idea why SMBX
never made this SW available outside the company.

BTW, has anyone ever seen the 'Analyst' spreadsheet developed by Xerox
Information Systems in Pasadena in Smalltalk for the US govt?  You can
put anything you want into the cells, including pictures, recursive
spreadsheets, etc.!  I've never seen either Xerox or ParcPlace ever
push this product, even though those in the govt gave it very high
marks.

-- 
Henry Baker
www/ftp directory URL:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html