Byte Magazine – LISP (1979) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08 <comment><USER2> I'm always a little sad that I missed the golden age of computing. I read my first Byte Magazine in the mid 1990s, a couple of years before they stopped publishing. Even then there was a ton of substance about the upcoming Windows 95 release, various detours in OS design that never panned out like Taligent, and how RISC was going to take over the world. It's rare to read articles of that depth anymore, even on the web much less in published media.

<comment><USER3> Personally, I think there was nothing golden-age about that time. I stuck with Physics. Monthly breakthroughs, yes. The giants whose shoulders we stand on, walking the earth, yes. But opportunities and platforms were miniscule compared to now. IBM'ers sneered at everyone else. This is the golden age of computing.

<comment><USER2> > This is the golden age of computing.

I disagree. In 1995, I picked up an issue of BYTE and marveled at the coverage of microkernel operating systems and RISC processors. New and exciting things were on the horizon! Now, I see only decadence. Hardware has stagnated for a decade. Software has less functionality while using exponentially more resources. Compare the Windows 10 Settings app to the Control Panel, which first debuted with Windows 95. Or the OneNote UWP app, which is now discontinued, to previous versions of OneNote. Key functionalities have gotten worse. Chrome's PDF handling is so awful that I spent weeks searching for a PDF viewer that's as good as Acrobat 10. To my shock everything was markedly worse--slower, less reliable searching, etc. I finally installed PDF XChange Editor and it was like a breath of fresh air. Not only does it search PDFs correctly, but it highlights the results and shows indicators of hits on the scrollbar! (Apps these days don't even _have_ scrollbars.)

Apple has given up on the Mac, and now it only gets iOS hand-me-downs. One of my great regrets is that I didn't get get my first Mac until 2007, and missed out on a big part of the Mac's heyday. I remember when each new release of OS X came out, I'd carefully read John Sircusa's intensive review on Ars Technica. The PDF imaging model in OS X 10.0, hardware accelerated compositing in 10.2, fine-grained locking in 10.4. That was 15 years ago! Kids who were born then are stealing alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinets now and the only cool thing to happen to OS X in their lifetime is APFS.

There are highlights, no doubt. Rust is a breakthrough. Apple's Ax processors bring desktop computing power into impossibly small form-factors. Pervasive mobile broadband has enabled a lot of new applications. (But the best software stack for leveraging that capability is a direct descendant of NeXTSTEP.) But it's few and far between now.

<comment><USER4> There is a very simple reason for that, which I learned when I was in college: the end of Moore's law. During the 80s and 90s Moore's law was in full force, and every few months hardware doubled in speed and halved in price. This was the heyday of computing! With the end of Moore's law we won't see that happening again anytime soon, the future is to do incremental improvements in computer architectures, unless we find something fundamental to fuel the next generation of computing.

<comment><USER5> You're gonna get the "lots of progress in hardware part" back soon, even without Moore's law :|

...but you're likely _not_ going to like it: will be a rain of exotic heterogeneous computing platforms first, with various ML/AI-accelerators all tailored to specific areas, at first used in IoT and mobile, then everywhere else. Thinks like NN-accelerators you now see in some mobile chips and "secondary chips" like T2s and what ever will become the dominant sources of computing power in systems, dwarfing the general-porpose-and-portable CPUs. And all software interacting with these will stop being portable in the way we know it, and as a result of network effects apps will no longer be portable across the many OS-flavours we'll have.

Second wave will be when ML gets to the point where it is heavily used to _design_ hardware: you'll have an explosion of hardware architectures with non-(human-brain-comprehensible) instruction sets (plus maybe even with analog computing modules), to the point that compilers will likely not even be able to be coded by hand in "assembler", we'll need to have evolved compiler- generator-genrate-generators too etc.

 _Progress is coming back, and it will accelerate..._ just that it will not be the ape-brain-comprehensible kind of progress we knew before...

<comment><USER6> > _Progress is coming back, and it will accelerate... just that it will not be > the ape-brain-comprehensible kind of progress we knew before..._

It also wont be the kind of progress we desire, either.

It's like we asked for jetpacks, but we get self-driving cars instead...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussed in 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439). (Reposts after a year are fine. This is for the curious.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I love this issue.

If you think LISP is cool (here comes a shameless plug), I think you might be interested in Tree Notation ([http://treenotation.org](http://treenotation.org)), which you could call LISP without parentheses. In the same way that a Tesla is a car without gas, LISP without parentheses can be drastically better. Imagine you get the power of LISP but you also get clean data, program synthesis, visual programming and more...

</comment><comment><USER9> I just went over a sample of the advertising companies. Some of them were acquired, most of them no longer exist, with the exception of Apple and Xerox. It might not be surprising, after all its been 40 years, but it is a strong testament to the fact that companies need to constantly evolve together with their markets. Being in the right place, at the right time, with the right product, is just the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, it was that issue that inspired me to save every dime for a PC. Took me a couple years but eventually got an Osborne (!) and ordered a Lisp interpreter for it...I forget the name of the vendor.

<comment><USER11> I too bought an Osborne 1 as my first computer. I bought a copy of MuLisp, I think the product eventually became Microsoft Lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Page 36 - "2c a byte". Very thankful for my $80M phone!!

</comment><comment><USER13> Link to the PDF of the 3rd scan of this issue. It should be higher quality, and allow offline viewing.

[https://ia801009.us.archive.org/0/items/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-...](https://ia801009.us.archive.org/0/items/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-08_Lisp/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-08_Lisp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Speaking of, I'm wondering about the down of LOGO? When and why LOGO went unpopular?

<comment><USER15> Logo was always regarded as a "kids language" by association with schools and turtles. It was very much a niche even in the mid 1980s when I learned it. Of course it was in reality a fairly sophisticated LISP relative, but programming languages are driven by fashion rather than facts.

<comment><USER16> Logo was designed to be a children's language, so the direction of causality between it being regarded as a "kid's language" and its association with schools and turtles goes the other way!

It used a turtle because Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert thought this was a good device for teaching about geometry, and Logo was associated with schools (and Lego!!!) because they were trying to change education.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_\(programming_language\))

Of course, you are also right in that once it has momentum along these lines, people tend to put it in a little box marked "children's language" and not build on it in a more general-purpose language direction.

A few folks have tried, but like squeak and pharos and so many other dialects of Lisp and Smalltalk, it has never gained serious traction outside of its original purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1981-08](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08)

<comment><USER17> Looking at these old BYTE magazines makes me think that magazines these days simply look much better. Graphics design has has simply gotten better. Not sure if this is just my subjective opinion but somehow I believe there must be some truth to that.

<comment> Arcanum-XIII What amaze me the most is that half of it is ad. Those and the content seem to have a very similar production value, which did muddle the reading a bit...

I don't miss this.

<comment><USER18> I used to buy it half for the adds - this was one of the few places you could find that stuff.

Edit: Actually, I remember buying the digital logic books on page 144, probably not from this issue.

<comment><USER19> This should be a reminder to everyone that regardless of how annoying ads are, they did serve a very useful purpose!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One more historical / nostalgic tid-bit: If you flip to page 156, you have Carl Helmers (or possibly Gary Kildall) trying to describe a spreadsheet to readers. In 1979, the concept of a spreadsheet was still new...

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow - 266 pages in a computer magazine!

I had forgotten what computer magazines used to be like. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> Well, several magazines would be like that until the age of the internet. The 90s was the last time when we saw a flourishing magazine market. Nowadays the very few magazines that survive are nothing more than a leaflet.

<comment><USER22> German tech magazines still seem to be surviving .. same with synth mags and sound/audio-engineering mags too ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER23> How women are represented in these ads. It is just awful....

<comment><USER24> "A Beautiful Way to Interface". Ugh. Yeah, it's really terrible.

<comment><USER25> or you can think, at least some parts of the culture are moving in the right direction--even if we're not where we should be.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good resource on using behavioral economics in software UI design? - <AUTHOR>

Having read Dan Ariely's and Daniel Kahneman's books on behavioral economics and cognitive biases, I started thinking about how to use them in software design.<p>Is there a good resource that discusses product and software design by applying behavioral economics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology? <comment><USER2> That's truly interesting question. I'm going to follow this. I've read both of those books too.</comment>


Google, Apple: Two Mobile Software Visions - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc20090722_093509.htm

<comment><USER2> does anyone actually get any work done on smartphones or is it just an excuse to have your business pay for goodies and writing it off?

<comment><USER3> gmail and google searches are 80% of what I use my iPhone for. Making / Receiving calls is about 19% and 1% is super monkey ball. So yeah, a mix of business and personal. It's so nice to have a decent browser in my pocket.

I didn't find this article very useful. Just citing biased opinions. I do agree though that thick-client phone apps seems like a bridge-gap while browsers evolve.</comment></comment>


Uber Tops 500,000 Signatures on Petition to Halt London Ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-23/uber-reaches-500-000-petition-signatures-to-protest-london-ban <comment><USER2> God this is all so ridiculous..

Just license Uber drivers and normal taxi drivers requiring police check, and psych test, refund all taxi plate fees with proceeds of new driver license fees and be done with it.</comment>