SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO

You're very welcome. Computer graphics has a very interesting history, and like many things, there's a lot to learn from studying it. Surprisingly, many techniques and principles are still relevant to this day. Thankfully, the Internet is full of documentation, post-mortem accounts and reference implementations to learn more about all this. Here's a bunch of random noteworthy things and references I forgot to link (sorry for potentially digging rabbit holes): The best information tends to come from official documentation detailing almost everything you want to know about the inner workings of systems. Additionally, unofficial community documentation can also be of great quality and complement official sources. The architecture overview posts from Rodrigo Copetti ( [link] ) pack a lot of accurate information at a glance, and are a great starting point if a specific topic piques your interest. The Resident Evil 2 microcode post-mortem: [link] Improved lighting, reverberation, Dolby surround and MP3 microcodes from Rare: [link] H.264 decoding microcode: [link] The Reality Signal Processor's programming guide: [link] Emulators' progress reports can reveal a lot about the details and intricacies required for accurately replicating these systems' features: [link] is one such amazing source of information, but all other major emulation efforts have equally interesting content. Transparency sorting of surfaces ( [link] ) is a hard problem to solve for traditional scanline renderers (

in “A trip through the Graphics Pipeline” · View on HN

Wings3D's UI workflow is really nice for 3D mesh modeling (it was actually inspired by the Symbolics 3D animation system [1]). Blender feels very cumbersome when you learned 3D modeling with Wings. It's really unfortunate that they chose to implement it in a language (ERLANG) that severely limits the number of people that can contribute to the software, and as a result, the development of Wings sort of stagnates. [1] ▶ this video

in “Gloss3D – an open source 3D Modeler for Linux and Windows” · View on HN

On Oberon, Mesa/Cedar and Lisp Machines, the experience extends to the whole OS and any application, or REPL, not just a plain text editor. Althought I haven't mentioned, Smalltalk also provides a similar experience. Here are some videos that try to convey it, from my playlists, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [link] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [link] "SymbolicsTalk28June2012" "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" ▶ this video "Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013" [link] The Native Oberon demos available at [link]

in “Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface” · View on HN

Lisp has a long history in computer graphics. It was particularly popular in the 1980s. There was Symbolics, a manufacturer of Lisp workstations (sometimes also remembered as the first company to register a .com domain). Symbolics had a Lisp-programmable 3D graphics suite that seems to have been fairly successful at the end of the decade. Here’s a video from 1989: ▶ this video The video doesn’t seem to show any Lisp though. On the 2D side, the immensely popular AutoCAD adopted Lisp as its expansion language in 1985. Autodesk founder John Walker explains the decision in this contemporary memo “Why Lisp”: [link]

in “Ronin – A Lisp-based image processing tool” · View on HN

Reminds me of Symbolics S-PACKAGES from the 1980s... (also LISP) ▶ this video Edit: looks like someone beat me to it below

in “Ronin – A Lisp-based image processing tool” · View on HN

Genera on the Lisp Machine is very much an embodiment of this graphical command line (or rather just command) user interface. There's quite a lot to it. CLIM (and the open source McCLIM) is the current realisation of this. There's some documentation about 'Commands' in CLIM II here for example: [link] Commands are first class objects which live in command tables and which CLIM can look at to generate bits of UI and allow parameters to be specified. Central to this in CLIM is the idea of presentations - where domain objects are 'presented' onto the screen and the link to the domain object is maintained. That way you can invoke a command on that object in various ways, for example you can type a command name and then click a presented object which is acceptable as a parameter. The Symbolics S-packages used these concepts to make (I presume) powerful 3d modelling programs back in the day (I haven't used them): ▶ this video - sorry for the poor video quality. [link] (lispm on here) sometimes posts interesting things about Genera

in “CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line” · View on HN

> i use word count as the benchmark value Words are called 'symbols' in Lisp. Making extremely expressive domain level constructs is reducing the code size a lot in larger Lisp programs. > Lisp is not a particularly declarative type of language Just the opposite. Lisp is one of the major tools to write declarative code. The declarations are a part of the running system and can be queried&changed while the program is running. > Lisp ... all win contests for fewest characters, Most Lisp since the end 70s don't care about character count. Lisp usually uses very descriptive symbols as operator names. Lisp users invented machines with larger memory sizes in the late 70s, to get rid of limitations in code and data size. Paul Graham is favoring low-character count code, but this is not representative for general Lisp code, which favors low-symbol count code through expressive constructs. > understand this domain specific language without executing the code the languages will be documented and will be operators in the language. Other programming languages also create large vocabularities, but in different ways. Lisp makes it easy to integrate syntactic abstractions in the software, without the need to write external languages, which many other systems need to do. For example one can see the Common Lisp Object System as a domain-specific extension to write object-oriented code in Lisp. It's constructs are well documented and widely use in Lisp. > it/is firmly routed in the terminal/co

in “Show HN: Bel” · View on HN

There was never a really cheap Lispm. The 'cheap' ones were a Mac II + TI microexplorer or the Mac II + MacIvory. But developer workstations were always expensive - Lispm or not - or underpowered. What was also expensive was the software. I got a KEE license on a used machine I was given. I think it cost $50k. Similar Symbolics extensions for their OS could be extremely expensive. The graphics suite did cost several 10k per module (paint, model, render, tools, ...). > a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market Well, they could not live from developers alone. They were also looking for end users. Some of the machines were thought as delivery machines, cheaper and with less resources. There were also tools like 'firewall', which were supposed to keep users from getting in contact with the development environment (like debugger, ...). Actually Symbolics also targeted high-end endusers, both with hardware and with software. They had to go beyond government developers - to be able to sell machines/software. There were applications that were kind of development centric, like the iCAD cad system - where one could program 3d models via Flavors extensions. But one huge area for Symbolics was the graphics market. 2d, 2.5d animation, 3d animation, paint/model/render. Much of that was used without programming. The graphics suite was mostly targeted at graphics professionals, often doing 3d visualizations for TV, cinema and gam

in “The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]” · View on HN

Good article I hadn't run across before; thanks for linking it. One interesting side story is the odd Symbolics foray into animation and video through the Symbolics Graphics Division, which afaict was reasonably successful for a few years. It seemed like the sort of application-oriented business that might let the Symbolics machines break out of single-purpose "AI machines" into being seen as general workstations, or at least dual-purpose AI/graphics workstations. But that business seems to have sort of evaporated along with the rest of their business, despite not being AI and there being no "graphics winter". Perhaps steamrollered by Silicon Graphics, and the same trends towards Unix and commodity CPUs? Or not marketed well enough, by a company whose public materials focused too exclusively on Lisp+AI? Some bits from that era: the S-Package 3d modeling/animation system ( ▶ this video ), the PaintAmation package ( [link] ), and the first HDTV processing on a workstation ( [link] ).

in “Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)” · View on HN