My favorite paragraph, about LISP machines:
>It is a very weird experience. It feels like a machine for monks or nuns. Baffling. But there is this weird sense of raw power . . .
>It is a very weird experience. It feels like a machine for monks or nuns. Baffling. But there is this weird sense of raw power . . .
Edit: It's hard to distinguish someone's tone on the internet, but I did not intend to be captious or mean spirited. My point is that there are enough differences between LISP and Lisp Machine Lisp, a descendent of Maclisp, that the two are not interchangeable.
Only the frontpage says:
LISP
CHINE
NUAL
I especially liked how you could patch a running kernel, but only if you entered a specific keystroke sequence the right way the first time. If you muffed it, a flag got set and the system would disallow future attempts even if you got it right later. It's more like a puzzle in a text adventure than an OS security mechanism.
And, of course, the command shell was a machine code debugger, but that really wasn't hugely weird in itself.