[LMH] Ooh, look! List traffic!

[Ricardo Bánffy]

On Friday, March 5, 2004, at 10:25 AM, Jaap Weel wrote:

> Somewhat old-fashionedly, the mailing list is set up so that if you 
> hit the reply button in your email client, it replies to the sender, 
> not to the mailing list. This behavior is a near-religious issue with 
> some mailing list administrators that you probably don't want to 
> touch, but for the time being, you should probably use reply-all. I 
> sometimes forget, too. While I'm at it, let me comment on your > message.

If it is a religious issue, I can live with it ;-)

> Being somewhat of a bookworm, I'm always interested in written 
> matters; what was it you found about Lisp machines in your college 
> library?

Discussions about AI-related stuff and ads featuring machines that 
looked amazingly cool ;-)

> The consensus at the time was to not deal with legal issues until 
> anyone is approaching a working emulator.

We could do something in the political sphere. I bet they don't expect 
to extract much cash from this, but they could win sympathy. Having 
said that, the Hercules mainframe emulator keeps coming to my mind. IBM 
could license more software for hobbyist or education purposes.

>> As Alastair pointed out, it is a big, hard and scary thing to do, 
>> until actually doing it proves us wrong.
> Yes, and the main problem seems to be finding out the details of how 
> the system worked. If the project were to write an emulator for a 
> machine that was completely specified, the project would probably be 
> much further by now; unfortunately the brave hackers that have worked 
> on it so far seem to have to spend a lot of time reverse-engineering.

You mean there is no documentation on low level programming?! Oh boy... 
This may just be a big hard and scary thing to do and actually doing it 
may prove us right ;-) Have the results of this reverse-engineering 
been published? I can't find much about it.