This report details the progress of the Medley Interlisp Project in 2025, including work on the core system, community outreach, and future plans for preserving and reviving the historical Interlisp environment.
This Hackaday article discusses the historical significance of the Atari 800 and 400 computers, released in 1979, and their impact on the early home computer market. It highlights how the Atari 800, with its music synthesizer, bit-mapped graphics, and sprites, compared favorably to competitors like the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80.
A Landel Mailbug email appliance was repurposed into an AI console using an ESP32 microcontroller, text-to-speech, and the ChatGPT API.
A site dedicated to the preservation and curation of the many games and worlds created with ZZT. ZZT is a text-mode game from 1991 created by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games.
Microsoft has released version 1.1 of Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 under an MIT license. This version, from mid-1978, supports the Commodore PET, KIM-1, and early Apple models. It's a version that has circulated unofficially for some time, now with licensing clarified.
Niklas Roy has created a modern-day take on the two-wheeled robots used in schools in the 1980s with Logo programming. His robots are vector plotters that create artwork and can be built with an Arduino Nano.
Fernando J. Corbató was a Professor Emeritus at MIT, renowned for his pioneering work in the development of time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems. He was instrumental in creating the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) and Multics, both influential systems that laid the groundwork for modern operating systems. Corbató's contributions have been widely recognized through numerous awards and fellowships, including the Turing Award (1990) and the Computer Pioneer Award (1982). He was a long-time member of the MIT Computation Center and the Laboratory for Computer Science, and held leadership positions within the department. His work significantly impacted the field of computer science and the evolution of computing technology.
A forum dedicated to bug-lispm, a project related to the Lisp Machine. The page lists recent threads with their creation dates, titles, and number of posts/days spanned.
The article argues that the perception of C as a “low‑level” language has become outdated.
- **Historical context** – In the early 1970s, C on the PDP‑11 was literally close to the metal: each statement mapped to one or two machine instructions, memory was flat, and the execution model was straightforward.
- **Modern hardware** – Today’s CPUs are far more complex (multi‑core, deep pipelines, out‑of‑order execution, vector units, large caches, speculative execution). They are designed to run legacy C code efficiently, but the underlying reality is far removed from the simple model that early C programmers relied on.
- **The illusion** – Modern processors adapt to preserve the old C abstract machine, giving developers the impression that C is still “low‑level.” This illusion hides a mismatch between what C promises (predictable, simple mapping to hardware) and what the hardware actually does.
- **Historical context** – In the early 1970s, C on the PDP‑11 was literally close to the metal: each statement mapped to one or two machine instructions, memory was flat, and the execution model was straightforward.
- **Modern hardware** – Today’s CPUs are far more complex (multi‑core, deep pipelines, out‑of‑order execution, vector units, large caches, speculative execution). They are designed to run legacy C code efficiently, but the underlying reality is far removed from the simple model that early C programmers relied on.
- **The illusion** – Modern processors adapt to preserve the old C abstract machine, giving developers the impression that C is still “low‑level.” This illusion hides a mismatch between what C promises (predictable, simple mapping to hardware) and what the hardware actually does.
