Paolo Amoroso<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fosstodon.org/@interlisp" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>interlisp</span></a></span> ☝️ I've been using the SEdit structure editor of Medley Interlisp for the past couple of years and I'm now more fluent with keyboard and mouse gestures, which work very well together to efficiently manipulate Lisp code.</p><p>The lack of support for cursor keys and keyboard navigation doesn't get in the way of editing. In addition to quick mouse gestures, the most common cases of cursor movement are handled by other keys such as <code>)</code> for moving outside and <code>Backspace</code> for moving inside a list.</p><p><a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/interlisp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>interlisp</span></a> <a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/lisp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>lisp</span></a> <a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/editor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>editor</span></a></p>
#interlisp
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The file names of Interlisp sources have no extension. Would you prefer an extension such as .medley, .interlisp, or .il? Lowercase or uppercase?
This 1988 paper reports on Smalltalk-80 for exploratory programming and fast prototyping at Tektronix.
Standard software engineering uses programming to implement a given specification. In contrast, exploratory programming is writing the specification.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/51607.51614
Some of the parallels the paper draws to Interlisp-D are not entirely accurate.
https://groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c/G9ozbhT2OnQ/m/-XF_Ufm6CAAJ
This 1981 videotape demonstrates some Interlisp applications developed at Xerox PARC: the Interlisp-D environment, the Eurisko AI discovery system, the Trillium GUI designer for Xerox copier control panels, the Debuggy intelligent tutoring system, and an expert system for integrated circuit design.
It's 1986 and you want to use Interlisp-D on your Xerox workstation. This primer will get you up to speed with booting a Lisp image, handling floppy disks, using the mouse, transferring files to a VAX, and interacting with the environment. Some of the material is obsolete but gives an idea of what it was like to use a Lisp Machine in the 1980s.
The Common Lisp implementation of Medley Interlisp is closer to CLtL1 than ANSI but does support the condition system. The CONDITIONGRAPH tool shows the hierarchy graph of conditions.
If you use or tried running Medley Interlisp, what things did you discover later on that you wish you knew? We would appreciate your feedback.
Codeberg @Codeberg doesn't currently detect and display Interlisp sources, which it handles as binary files. I submitted a feature request for adding Interlisp support to Forgejo:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/8184
The developers started working on the feature and merged a pull request:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/8377
Thanks Forgejo and Codeberg!
Codeberg.orgfeat: Render Interlisp sources as text### Needs and benefits
[Interlisp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp) source files embed binary control codes for syntax highlighting such as `^F^B` for turning on bold. Codeberg treats theese sources as binary files, doesn't render them, and only allows to download the files as [this exam...
We now take it for granted but adding a display to a copying machine was a novel idea in the early 80s. In this 1984 video Austin Henderson told the history of and demoed Trillium, an Interlisp environment for designing and prototyping user interfaces for Xerox copier control panels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwzh1Q2GeQ
Trillium was actually more versatile as Henderson used the system to run the slideshow in this presentation. See also:
It would seem odd today but the 1986 edition of the Lafite manual had an appendix on email etiquette:
Using Lafite Courteously
https://files.interlisp.org/medley/library/lafite/docs/users-guide/LAFITEMANUAL-APPENDIXA.TEDIT.pdf
The full manual of Lafite, the email system of Medley Interlisp:
https://files.interlisp.org/medley/library/lafite/docs/users-guide
The TEdit WYSIWYG editor of Medley Interlisp has a split window mode that shows different parts of a document. To split at the cursor or unsplit, middle-click on the title bar and select Split Window or Unsplit Window.
I'm putting together a reading list on Xerox Network Systems (XNS), the network architecture developed at PARC and Xerox which influenced TCP/IP.
I'd like to learn more to play with the network functionality of Medley Interlisp based on XNS. Medley's TCP/IP stack is currently incomplete and not working.
https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/bitsavers/pdf/xerox/xns/XNSG058504_XNS_Introduction.pdf
A 1988 demonstration of the Cognoter collaborative brainstorming tool in Interlisp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzBj13OSVzM
It was an application of project Colab at Xerox PARC to study how computers could support face-to-face-meetings. The researchers designed a conference room with specialized equipment such as a touch sensitive projection screen and collaboration software in Interlisp running on networked workstations.
About Colab:
In the Medley Interlisp documentation and literature the word "button" was used as a verb for mouse gestures for which we would now say "click". For example:
"Left-buttoning the display window updates it, and middle-buttoning the window brings up a menu that allows you to change the display state."