Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2012-06-28 Kalman Reti on Symbolics Lisp Machines

http://fare.livejournal.com/168016.html

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, June 28th 2012 at 1800 at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room). Kalman Reti will speak about Symbolics Lisp Machines.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Speakers to be announced.

1 Kalman Reti on Symbolics Lisp Machines

Kalman Reti will talk about some of the history of the Lisp machine and some features of the Symbolics Lisp machines that were unique, including both hardware and software features. He'll discuss how the Alpha emulator works and Brad Parker's hack to make it run on 64bit modern machines. Finally he'll demonstrate Genera running on his laptop.

Kalman Reti worked for Symbolics from 1982 through 1992, mostly on VLSI tools for Ivory but also writing low-level device support (e.g. a LMFS recovery utility, R/W optical drive support, LZW compressor, etc.) The last few years of that were spent doing customer consulting. After being laid off when Symbolics went into chapter 11, Kalman worked for Apple in Cambridge, first on MCL and later, after MCL was sold to Digitool, on Dylan. Kalman was hired after that by Symbolics Technology, Inc., who had acquired the assets of Symbolics from the bankruptcy court, to work on further productizing the emulator for the Alpha. This was used by John Mallery at MIT to run his document distribution system for the White House during the Clinton presidency. When the owners of that venture decided that a financial company had no business owning a computer company, a private individual bought the assets and Kalman spent 4 years as a "captive consultant" for him. Since 2002, when he ran out of money, I've worked for Ab Initio (doing nothing with lisp except emacs hacks).

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, June 28th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room).

The Star conference room, MIT 32-D463 on the fourth floor of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge MA 02139. NB: there are two sets of elevators, you want to use those on the south-western side, further away from Main St.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stata+Center,+Vassar+Street,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks go to Professor Gerald J. Sussman for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

We don't have any sponsors to offer us dinner, but we're big boys and can provide for ourselves. Before we start the conference, we'll organize a big pizza order, where those who want can chip in; after the conference is when we'll eat it.

5 More about the Meeting

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://common-lisp.net/project/ boston-lisp/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.