Why we need lisp machines.

Computers have changed a lot in 51 years. 51 years ago computers were so expensive that we had to have multiple users per machine to make it financially feasible. 51 years ago most multi-user operating systems were messy, inconstant, and in general a pain in the ass. So some dude at Bell Labs built a little OS to fix the pain in the assery of multi-user OS’s and they did a wonderful job.

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Luckily UNIX wasn’t the only thing being built in the 70s and 80s, the wonderful people at MIT also needed a timesharing system for their PDP-10. So in 1967, they built ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System). It had some interesting design choices, no passwords, no file permissions, your shell was a binary debugger, etc. This is terrible for production use, but it’s a hacker’s dream come true and it gave us Emacs and scheme. It also gave us a program called MacLisp.

Fulton discusses lisp machines, and how modern day Unix while oh-so powerful, is convoluted and not built for the sorts of physical systems we have today.

UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse. We need a new system and we have more than enough frame buffers and memory for a lisp machine.

With lisp machines, we can cut out the complicated multi-language, multi library mess from the stack, eliminate memory leaks and questions of type safety, binary exploits, and millions of lines of sheer complexity that clog up modern computers.

This does sound cool, if not quite abstract, coming from a functional programming enjoyer myself.