Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@fedops UUCP interoperated with FidoNet? Interesting.

@lproven @withaveeay

@lproven Here it is, I got UUCP access from Sublink Network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublink_Network

@withaveeay

@lproven The Elm email client ran perfectly on Coherent. I also easily ported XScheme by David Betz.

@withaveeay

@lproven Maybe Stephen Ness knows more. He worked at MWC also on Coherent, for example the excellent manual. I exchanged a few mails with him.

https://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc

@withaveeay

@lproven With that Coherent setup I also used UUCP over dial-up to send email via an Italian provider connected to an Internet gateway at Rutgers University. My paid plan carried Usenet too but I never used it.

I was living in the future. I recall a Computer Science professor at the university I was a student at impressed by a mail I sent him.

@withaveeay

@withaveeay I have fond memories of Coherent, which made me grok Unix.

I got it in Italy by mail order and installed it on a 386 laptop with 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard disk, half for Coherent and the rest for DR-DOS which shipped with the machine. Coherent was fantastic, for fun I even used my Amiga 500 as a serial terminal connected to the laptop via RS-232.

@lproven

@masinter ☝️ Let's celebrate the 50° anniversary of BITBLT with an Interlisp implementation of Conway's game of life based on BITBLT. In the above toot Larry Masinter, who wrote the Interlisp code, hints at how it works. The running program looks like this:

https://github.com/orgs/Interlisp/discussions/1097#discussioncomment-10304486

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@fvzappa/115574872559813280

#bitblt #interlisp #retrocomputing #GameOfLife

@symbolics I've see records of a purchase of a Xerox Interlisp D-machine by an Italian research institution in the late 1980s. The price tag, which included WAN connectivity and support, was eye watering.

@noplasticshower What did the pedals do?

@sigue These days I don't see such claims much either, but Tim is a very experienced Lisper and makes some good points.

@Phosphenes As the post I linked also notes, performance is not the only consideration as Lisp was already competitive in speed with Fortran in the late 1970s.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/ADA052304/

@davidgerard If anything goes wrong they can just shrug it off to the AI and get away with it. So sue the AI.

Tim Bradshaw discusses the myths around Lisp Machines and why they were probably never competitive.

https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines

#LispMachine #retrocomputing #lisp

@jackdaniel Yes, large Lisp macros are exciting. 😀

@tengkuizdihar Thanks for the heads up.

@3rz

@3rz That's weird as the page worked for me in Firefox up to a few tens of minutes ago, but now I get the warning too. I tried disabling uBO and Privacy Badger but I still get the warning, even in Chrome. Maybe a breaking update to Safe Browsing?

@alavi Absolutely, they'r just for my tiny hobby projects. But it feels great to get to pick the tools you love.

@mikro2nd I'm lucky as I don't do anything cross-platform, and would use CLIM if I did.

@alavi I take refuge in Medley Interlisp and CLIM.

@mikro2nd No, sorry.