Lisp machine 这种用 Lisp 代码当机器的汇编指令的硬件实现为什么销声匿迹了？硬件和 Lisp 这样的高级语言两个极端如何融合在一起？

为什么我们需要了解编程的历史？

The most important computer you’ve never heard of

This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on October 29, 1969—only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). To Kline and his co-conspirator, Bill Duvall, it was no big deal. “It was just engineers working,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneer of computer networking and a leader of the project.

The show was part of a larger Computer Literacy Project started by the British government and the BBC as a response to fears that the UK was deeply and alarmingly unprepared for the new revolution in personal computing that was happening in America. Unlike most TV shows, the BBC wanted to feature a computer on the show that would be used to explain fundamental computing concepts and teach a bit of BASIC programming. The concepts included graphics and sound, the ability to connect to teletext networks, speech synthesis, and even some rudimentary AI. As a result, the computer needed for the show would have to be pretty good—in fact, the producers' demands were initially so high that nothing on the market really satisfied the BBC's aspirations.

Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first Difference Engine project received a British Government grant of £517,470 - a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of- computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM corporation built the first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late '30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuze, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs and electronic logic gates.

Smalltalk was a revolutionary system developed by the Learning Research Group (LRG) at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, led by Alan Kay. Smalltalk was comprised of a programming language, a development environment, and a graphical user interface (GUI), running on PARC’s groundbreaking Alto computer. In fact, it is most famous for being the GUI that inspired Steve Jobs when he and a group of Apple engineers visited PARC in 1979. Smalltalk pioneered overlapping windows, popup menus, and paned browsers, all controlled by a mouse. All of these UI elements have come down to us today through systems like the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Smalltalk was also one of the earliest, and most influential, object-oriented programming languages, which make up the most dominant type of programming languages today. Object-oriented languages are designed to make it easy to reuse existing pieces of code, but in a flexible way. Python, Java, Ruby, and Objective-C, among others, all owe debts to ideas originally developed in Smalltalk.

The Smalltalk Zoo is a collection of historical versions of the revolutionary graphical programming and user environment Smalltalk, originally developed at Xerox PARC, ranging from the 1972 version all the way to the modern “Squeak” version whose development began in 1995. These emulated Smalltalk environments run in your web browser and are hosted by CHM at smalltalkzoo.thechm.org.

A 1971 issue of the radical feminist journal off our backs includes an announcement for a May meeting in Atlantic City “against the misuse of technology.” An announcement for that meeting also appears in a 1971 issue of alternative publication The Realist. There, CPP placed a call for activists to appear at that year’s Spring Joint Computer Conference, an event that the ad points out is “overwhelmingly dominated by white males,” so as to call attention to issues that are critical today — namely, “the use of computer information systems as a means of social control,” “corporate racism,” and “the role of automation on rising unemployment.”