Subject: Re: Is LISP dying? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/24 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3141791703694855@naggum.no> * rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock) | Yup!!! I learned a *lot* (in the early 1970's) from reading the | sources to TOPS-10, the operating system for the DEC PDP-10, which | was shipped with every PDP-10. funny you should say that. I "grew up" on PDP-10's, too, somewhat later than you did, however, and worked with both TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, the COMND JSYS of which is still a better way to do command-line interfaces than anything implemented since then, not to mention the way the program itself would be "half-started" in order to help complete its own command line. in general, it's a real pity so little of what was done so well in those systems were communicable to those who had not used them. however, the sources to TOPS-10 were not availble to the public: you had to purchase the computer first to get the operating system for "free". since the demise of the TOPS-20 project at Digital, the sources for the last version have been rumored to be about to be released about 20 times, to my knowledge, and still nothing has happened. I don't know what is so important to protect, but it is clearly not "free software" in the sense we're discussing these days. #:Erik -- suppose we blasted all politicians into space. would the SETI project find even one of them?