🚀 go-pugleaf

>From: reti@wilson.ai.mit.edu
>Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 10:58 -0400
>Subject: Re: Keyboard weirdness. Anyone familiar with this behavior? 
>To: mikemac@mikemac.com, joswig@lavielle.com
>
>    Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 18:18 EDT
>    From: Mike McDonald <mikemac@mikemac.com>
>
>
>    >Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 23:47:45 +0200
>    >To: <reti@wilson.ai.mit.edu>
>    >From: Rainer Joswig <joswig@lavielle.com>
>    >Subject: Re: Keyboard weirdness. Anyone familiar with this behavior?
>
>    >Sigh!!!! Imagine a MacIvory in a Nubus PowerPC Mac with a
>    >G3 upgrade card. Better yet a new faster Ivory in a G3 Mac.
>
>      Dwelling on the unattainable is only going to depress you. And me!
>
>Actually, I've been thinking about doing a MacIvory IV (software only) for
>the fast PowerBooks.  Would this be something you'd be interested in?  It
>would probably not have great performance (somewhere between an XL400 and
>and XL1200, hopefully nearer XL1200 but it will be hard).  The reason is that
>the 64-bit emulator for the Alpha is already register limited holding more
>than 32-bit data, so this problem gets much worse on a 32 bit machine.  Also,
>it will have to do software virtual memory for the 34-bit address space.

  These are just my personal opinions. The firm I work for knows
nothing about Lisp. (When I told them about CLOS, they were shocked.
They didn't know lisp even had arrays! I have a LONG task ahead to
educate these folks. Now, showing them a real lispm environment might
get their attention.) They also got rid of all of the Macs in the
company about 18 months ago. 

  Although I'd rather have a x86 version, preferably under Linux, a PB
version would be interesting. (I understand the difficulties that the
lack of registers on the x86 gives for performance.) Of course, one of
the concerns is always cost. Given that there already is MCL for the
Macs at less than a grand, I'd think Genera priced in the multiple
thousands range would have very few buyers. (Other than Rainer.) I
would imagine that if you did a highly tuned emulator, that you'd end
up charging in the same range as the Alpha version.

  At one time, Symbolics had a more "portable" emulator that was
written in C. I understand the performance wasn't what Symbolics was
looking for at the time. (Just how bad was it? Say you ran it on a
400MHz x86, would the performance be in the range of a 3600? 3620?
XL400? CADR-1?) If you could get say 3620 performance out of it
without much tuning, would a better scheme be to make a variety of
ports of it available at a smaller (say $500) price? Then, based upon
the demand for a higher performance version for a particular platform,
you could then do the fine tuned version and charge correspondingly
more for it. This approach would have the advantage that you could
find out where there truely was demand before you invested a lot of
time and effort in a fine tuned port. It'd also allow people to try
out Genera without too large of a financial outlay. There's a whole
generation out there that hasn't even seen a LispM, let alone used one
enough to know how wonderful the environment is. Somehow Symbolics has
to find a way to reach them. 

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@mikemac.com