Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video]

Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by linguae on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @11:58AM (#39617988)

I have the same dream. A part of me wishes Richard Stallman set out on making a Lisp OS instead of making a Unix clone, but this was the mid-1980s and thus I understand the technical limitations and the social environment of the time. The 1990s could’ve been a better time; workstations and commodity PCs were powerful enough to run an entire Lisp or Smalltalk operating system, and there would’ve been substantial interest in such a system. Imagine had we ended up with a free, open source Lisp or Smalltalk OS running on the Pentium and PowerPC machines of the era as an alternative to Linux and the BSDs. I think this would’ve been an easier foundation to develop a FOSS desktop instead of the X11/KDE/GNOME/Wayland situation we have today.

But the dream isn’t dead. If only I had more free time…

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by melvinroest on Thursday March 07, 2024 @02:50AM (#39626328)

Apply to YC for fun and see if they'll fund you. It's a long shot due to the non-commercial nature. But who knows? If you do, include me in it. I'm not the best OS dev, but I do know Pharo. I'm up for making a YC application if you are! ;-)

My email is in my profile if you'd want to entertain this idea.

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by morphle on Thursday March 07, 2024 @11:43AM (#39631140)

The dream isn't dead, a number of people are working on it. Several live systems are demonstrated in talks on Youtube.

There are several working systems and even a real OS with native device drivers on modern bare hardware.

You can run legacy code under its qemu sandbox, but that is added only to broaden its appeal to customers as this part is not 'live'.

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by infinite8s on Thursday March 07, 2024 @04:18PM (#39634691)

Sadly the work from the STEPS project seems to have disappeared, especially the Frank software he used in some talks. That looks like it would have been very interesting to play with.

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by morphle on Thursday March 07, 2024 @04:52PM (#39634995)

I have most of the Frank/STEPS code still running. I posted a lot about it before on HN.

Yes, its a lot of fun to play with it, I invite people to join in the fun. 20.000 Lines of code for almost all of personal computing.

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by infinite8s on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:22PM (#39635869)

Thanks, do you have any of it publicly available or would you prefer an email?

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by morphle on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:52PM (#39636074)

Not all is publicly available and most needs recompiling and explanation. I prefer email.

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[dead]

Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by morphle on Monday March 11, 2024 @07:28AM (#39666749)

you can try morphle73 at gmail dot com

This Apple mail server seems to reject your emails because it thinks its spam.

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by lproven on Saturday March 09, 2024 @04:49PM (#39655015)

> Sadly the work from the STEPS project seems to have disappeared

Unfortunately that phrase -- steps project -- is effectively un-Googleable.

Do you have a link at all please?

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by morphle on Monday March 11, 2024 @07:27PM (#39674375)

search/google "steps alan kay" or watch https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/video/lecture-putt...

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Re:Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 21, 2024 [video] by lproven on Saturday March 09, 2024 @04:48PM (#39655010)

> A part of me wishes Richard Stallman set out on making a Lisp OS instead of making a Unix clone

Oh so very much so, yes!

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