LispOS directly on hardware or on Unix kernel?

[Luca Pisati]

Henry G. Baker wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Fine, SMBX did have an internal spreadsheet tool.

Since I was an user, first, and software support, after,
at Symbolics in Italy, and at a reseller in France, I never
saw that.  I'm glad you had in house tools.  What I mean is that
I still have a working XL1200, and, unless I program it, I lack
a lot of basic tools.  I wouldn't like to see a perfect LispOs
which lacks these things ...

> 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

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