The troff family is one of the classic text formatting systems technically oriented people gravitate to. Jaqueline @sushee shares her experience with writing and formatting two novellas using groff on Linux, as well as the rest of the tooling and the writing process.
A Xerox technical report published in 1981 collected some papers on the design of Interlisp-D. It covered development status, display facilities and I/O, compiler opzimizations, and more.
https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/interlisp-d/Papers_On_Interlisp-D.pdf
'Mother of all editors' Emacs is 50
https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/11/01/mother-of-all-editors-emacs-is-50/5306727
By a startling coincidence, so is its arch-rival Vi
<- by me on #TheRegister
I'm checking out the Texmaker cross-platform LaTeX editor, which I run on Linux Mint Cinnamon with the full TeX Live distribution that comes with Mint. Texmaker is fast and has many useful features, I like it.
Texmaker seems one of the rare tools that encourage you to create, and make that work fun.
In this 1979 book David Barstow described the experimental development of an Interlisp program using a knowledge-based methodology. The book presented the rules and worked out the program from them.
A roundup of native and online LaTeX editors for Linux. Texmaker has several useful features and seems really nice.
Being polite with your software tools to make them work is not an invention of the AI bros. The venerable INTERCAL already pionered the concept in the early 1970s with the PLEASE modifier.
The project reported on in this IJCAI 1983 paper implemented and compared the same application, a knowledge-based system, on a variety of Lisp systems: Maclisp on a DEC-20, Franz Lisp on a VAX 11/780, Interlisp-D on a Dolphin, and Interlisp on a VAX 11/780. As the paper noted, the Xerox Dolphin workstation wasn't exactly a fast machine which made the graphical Interlisp-D experience worse.
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@slava/117518506158994160
This is a good time to dust off my LaTeX. As a plus, TeX is a vintage system.
@nathell @yogthos @hanshuebner Back in 1983, my BBC Micro booted straight into #Lisp. Most BBC Micros didn't do this, but the boot ROM was socketed and replaceable, and a Lisp ROM was available, so mine did. Obviously with 32 Kb of RAM including video memory, it was a small Lisp system, and interpreter only; but surprisingly rich. This reminds me of your single floppy Lisp idea.
https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17811
Certainly our ideas of an ideal environment are similar!
Whenever I need a smile I look at this photo of an amused ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti crouched in front of a shy little girl in Baikonour, Kazakhstan. When the photo was taken, in May of 2014, Samantha was serving as a backup crew member of the Soyuz TMA-13M space flight.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/14250863783/in/album-72157644330297400
I am going to get kicked out of this ceramics class for sure... #SoftwareArchaeology
The history and current preservation status of IBM System/360. An overview that helps orient in the IBM jungle.
Computer scientist Robert Sedgewick is a prolific writer and his most well known book series is Algorithms in X where X is one of series of programming languages. Among the least known is probably Algorithms in Modula-3 published in 1993 but, curiously, the Open Library copy contains the text of an unrelated book.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1730658M/Algorithms_in_Modula-3
The arrival of the 286 on the PC market and the approaches to real and protected mode by the major vendors of system software, Digital Research and Microsoft.
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/taming-intels-brain-damaged-chip
My weekly plug: "Computer Chronicles Revisited" is a monthly newsletter reviewing the classic PBS series. In each 16-page issue, I look at the people, companies, and products featured in a single episode. You can download each issue as a free PDF. I also sell 6- and 12-issue mail-order subscriptions (U.S. only) via my website.
This month's issue covers a late 1989 episode on portable computers, including the first Macintosh Portable and the IBM PS/2 Model P70.
https://www.computerchronicles.blog/computer-chronicles-revisited-139/
RE: https://functional.cafe/@jackdaniel/117490460828565370
Daniel Kochmański @jackdaniel rebuilt his personal website and, being a Lisper, used the Hunchentoot web server and framework written in Common Lisp.
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@interlisp/117466919875489420
Back in the day Interlisp was widely used in research in various domains. But, along with LUNAR, this is the only application for space or astronomy I have found so far.
Written in the early 1970s in BBN Lisp, the predecessor of Interlisp, LUNAR was a natural language interface for querying a database of Apollo lunar rock samples.
hold on I've got your AI accelerator right here
RE: https://mastodon.social/@AverageDog/117484236631472146
A new human-written book on developing a C compiler that targets x86_64.