Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Lecture 1A: Overview and Introduction to Lisp" video.

  1. OMG, we were young! (I was at the Lab for six months in 1971 and 1972, mainly hand-holding the politics of ARPA's disguise as DARPA, to comply with the Mansfield Amendment, but also having a lot of fun hacking, playing weird variations of chess and whatnot.) The closest thing I ever knew of as an "operating system" was DDT, Dynamic Debugging Technique, which is no doubt hiding in a closet somewhere deep within EMACS today. I learned LISP from a book, and by chatting with McCarthy at 55 Baud on teletype. A disk-pack the size of a birthday-cake was 180K and the first program I ever wrote was "PING," the text of which was "PONG." "PONG," of course went "PING," and when the screen gave me four of each I had answered my own curiosity: How deep is the stack on this thing? Cheers, to everybody: I'd love to hear from anybody way back then. -dlj. david DOT lloydjones AT gmail DOT com No hyphen in "lloydjones" for my address: I signed on to Google while they were all still at Stanford and their system didn't have a hyphen in it yet.🤣😂
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  2. One of the first big pieces of "video" was radio-telescopy. (1962 to 1972, my time). A great deal of the information in this is apparently picked up interferometrically, with pairs of observing stations today being located in Earth orbit and out by Neptune or, if its not politically incorrect, maybe Pluto. In those days they had to settle for California and New Zealand, and a bunch of flyboys kindly schlepped the two-inch Ampex video-tape around for us -- by Phantom jet or some damn thing -- to get their credit hours in the cockpit. ARPAnet probably paid for itself in the avgas, the fuel for all those students' planes, it saved the taxpayers when they put this odd variety of SneakerNet out of business. Or at least they had to put their flying credits on somebody else's job sheet... SneakerNet was when the 180K seven-inch floppy had replaced the ten-incher, and people covered the gaps between, say, Universities of Michigan and Utah (Mormons were pioneering whole swaths of stuff like computer graphics) by carrying physical floppies from Point A to Point B. The Ampex video-tape jape was the Airforce Academy's kind of SneakerNet.
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