Sure. I don't think anyone is arguing that we should fire up a Symbolics machine in 2015 and try to get work done on it.
Rather, it's the spirit of the machines - inspectable and programmable from the ground up - that's worth preserving.
Rather, it's the spirit of the machines - inspectable and programmable from the ground up - that's worth preserving.
This is what made me curious about the Smalltalk-based Squeak VM http://squeak.org/. Its entire interface and stack was inspectable and manipulatable in real time.
In practice it seemed a little buggy, though. If you installed Squeak programs too willy-nilly, pretty soon you'd get errors due to incompatibilities.