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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

The TI Explorers were much more common to be deployed in separate room than Symbolics, AFAIK, due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default (an optional thing for symbolics which used IIRC BNC). I remember seeing photos of rows of them being shuffled around at some point at one of the NASA sites. Explorer also had some interesting hardware options that probably evolved from LMI Lambda support for running Unix on separate board, for example I've seen documentation about pretty big stack of DSP as special compute accelerator usable from Lisp environment for dealing with live signal processing.

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I had a 30 meter (IIRC) console cable for my 3640.

Most University labs had a machine room where the Symbolics machines (if they had those) were standing (large, too noisy fans, drawing 1 kw or more electricity, ...). Cables for the console (1 Megapixel b/w screen, keyboard, mouse and digital audio) went from there into the offices. All one could hear were the clicks from the Symbolics mechanical keyboards.

The LMI and Explorer machines had some interesting hardware stuff. Too bad, that both companies left the business very early ...

Accelerators were available for the Symbolics machines, too. IIRC there were DSPs. Also an interface to the Pixar Image Computer and to Connection Machines. Or the FrameThrower, a programmable Framebuffer.

Yes, certainly. I was talking more on how Explorer had the long-range cabling made default while with Symbolics it was an option, although CADRs already had pioneered the long range setup including switchboard (what would be called KVMs today) at AI Lab. That said, it seemed to me that longer cabling was less in use with G- and I-machines, but that's just me looking over scraps that went onto internet.

Symbolics also definitely had an edge in graphical processing, though I've seen mentions suggesting that for pure CAD works that didn't require high-definition video output Explorers sold quite well?

> That said, it seemed to me that longer cabling was less in use with G- and I-machines, but that's just me looking over scraps that went onto internet.

The XL400 and XL1200 were large & loud beasts. You would not want to have them near you.

> Symbolics also definitely had an edge in graphical processing, though I've seen mentions suggesting that for pure CAD works that didn't require high-definition video output Explorers sold quite well?

Symbolics was also widely used in HDTV quality productions.

For CAD work I have no idea how big the market was. But for example iCAD was probably one of the applications that were making new stuff possible via parametric CAD. Then there was CAD in electronics and chip design...

HDTV, to which I referred as the requirement for high definition video output, was definitely Symbolics niche. I think HDTV-capable gear sized as individual workstations and not custom niche (even more niche than lisp machines, that is) systems only as pricy addons on SGIs and similar around ~1994, though some of the 1990~1994 Sun gear could do a lot there but AFAIK was geared more towards CAD clients than HDTV.

Unfortunately it seems like Explorer software is way less documented :/

Besides all the animation stuff, a prominent application was for the Space Shuttle. NASA bought a bunch of Symbolics XL Lisp machines, to process HDTV video feeds to monitor the Space Shuttle launches. From 1990:

"Recently the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) used Symbolics' high-definition technology to analyze HDTV video images of the Discovery launch in real-time. This high-definition system enabled NASA engineers to get an instant replay of critical launch systems. The engineers were able to enhance and enlarge high-resolution images of the lift-off in order to analyze the condition of and spot potential problems with space shuttle tiles."

NASA's STS seemed to be full of very eclectic setup - I mean we had Symbolics machines running video analysis, Amigas running telemetry, I think Explorer's might have been involved in early days of Hubble scheduling software (that now runs on Unix with X11), etc. etc.

yes, the early SPIKE software for Hubble was on TI Explorers.

> due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default

I would NEVER imagine a graphical console that’s connected that way to a machine. This is why preserving these machines is so important - it’s hard to even know the tech we’d lose (and be doomed to reinvent) when the machines are lost to time.

Significant part of extant, or at least longer-surviving, Matrox business once they mostly got out of GPU space was in devices like that - displays connected by long cables, things like specialized GPUs with 8P8C or fiber connectors that provided DisplayPort + USB over longer range, to connect users to computer running elsewhere.

That is pretty cool. I think I remember small boxes with PS/2 and VGA ports and ethernet connections.

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