johnlorentzson

It's great to see Stacken's old machine being taken care of and tinkered with, I'm sure some of our older members will be thrilled to see this. For the past 20 years we sadly haven't had space for minicomputers or mainframes, though for a while we were planning to run an emulated PDP-10 with ITS or something (project on hold due both to the emulated system's clock drifting dramatically and the VT220 I was using spontaneously breaking very subtly: key commands don't transmit anything, but everything else works). I'm too young to have used any of these machines myself for anything approaching real work, but I can't help but be fascinated by them.

In Sweden we tell that same story but with a nail instead of a rock. "Cooking soup on a nail" is a somewhat common expression here.

A pair of smart modems should certainly be able to connect, but it's very likely they would only be able to negotiate a fairly low speed. The classic 300 baud Bell 103 modulation can probably work perfectly fine even over early 2010s Skype. Although possibly with a lot of dropped bits...

I remember dialing into a BBS in the mid 2010s over an international phone call going through a late-stage digital switch locally (possibly one of the later AXE switches but I have no way of knowing for sure anymore), and the call would almost have to have gone through lossy compression on its way to the US.

As far as I know calling free is optional with Fil-C. It can prevent situations where some memory is no longer needed but isn't freed due to some remaining pointer to it sitting around somewhere, but it's not required. The GC will act like a GC if given the opportunity.

Typically, for development, one will start a clean image in the morning and load it up with a combination of newly compiled code and automatically cached previously compiled code. This is mostly invisible to the user unless something goes wrong with the cache and it has to be cleared. The unaware user could think they're recompiling everything every time.

That sounds about right. (Just to clarify, what I was referring to with "did not exist at the time" was specifically Self's JIT and its new techniques.)

With regards to performance, Craig Chambers's thesis on the Just-In-Time compiler for Self proves pretty definitively that a language as (or more) flexible as Smalltalk can be very performant without losing any dynamic properties. It certainly isn't an easy compiler/runtime to recreate for any given language, but it does exist.

It didn't exist at the time you're referring to however, so in that context the point does stand, mostly. I believe there was some form of flexible compiled optimization for Smalltalk (since Chambers's thesis references it as prior work) but I forget when that was and how commonly used it was.

That sounds about right. It's very easy to make something resembling a Lisp, and even easier to call the result a Lisp.

DOOM was definitely made with DOS in mind, but it also ran on NeXT from the beginning. It's pretty portable actually. Since you cited Fabien Sanglard, I guess I should mention that his book about DOOM's source code (Game Engine Black Book: DOOM) explains how the portability stuff (as well as almost everything else) worked in great detail.

The Build engine's source code isn't enough to port any game running on it, since Build was made as a library (I believe most developers using Build in the 90s didn't have access to the source code).

Also, wasn't there an official Blood port by Nightdive Studios?

It's wonderful when I have to show my ID before I can watch a video of the funny man saying fuck (I'm not kidding, that's sometimes but usually not enough to get it automatically age-restricted).

Why not? That's how proper English text is written. Of course there are many programs that can't handle it properly (or handles it inconveniently) so in practice it might be problematic at times, but otherwise I see nothing wrong with it.

Using the Symbolics Document Examiner was the best manual reading experience I've ever had

The only notable thing they share is that they were both written in Lisp.