some times my first glimpse goes to the appendix. john mccarthy (history of lisp, 1978)

APPENDIX - HUMOROUS ANECDOTE The first on-line demonstration of LISP was also the first of a precursor of time-sharing that we called "time-stealing".

The audience comprised the participants in one of M.I.T.'s Industrial Liaison Symposia on whom it was important to make a good impression. A Flexowriter had been connected to the IBM 704 and the operating system modified so that it collected characters from the Flexowriter in a buffer when their presence was signalled by an interrupt. Whenever a carriage return occurred, the line was given to LISP for processing. The demonstration depended on the fact that the memory of the computer had just been increased from 8192 words to 32768 words so that batches could be collected that presumed only a small memory.

The demonstration was also one of the first to use closed circuit TV in order to spare the spectators the museum feet consequent on crowding around a terminal waiting for something to happen. Thus they were on the fourth floor, and I was in the first floor computer room exercising LISP and speaking into a microphone. The problem chosen was to determine whether a first order differential equation of the form Mdx + Ndy was exact by testing whether OMlOy = cNIcx, which also involved some primitive algebraic simplification.

Everything was going well, if slowly, when suddenly the Flexowriter began to type (at ten characters per second) "THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR HAS BEEN CALLED. SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS ARE AS FOLLOWS:" and on and on and on.

The garbage collector was quite new at the time, we were rather proud of it and curious about it, and our normal output was on a line printer, so it printed a full page every time it was called giving how many words were marked and how many were collected and the size of list space, etc. During a previous rehearsal, the garbage collector hadn't been called, but we had not refreshed the LISP core image, so we ran out of free storage during the demonstration. Nothing had ever been said about a garbage collector, and I could only imagine the reaction of the audience. We were already behind time on a tight schedule, it was clear that typing out the garbage collector message would take all the remaining time allocated to the demonstration, and both the lecturer and the audience were incapacitated by laughter. I think some of them thought we were victims of a practical joker.

a digital computer is often characterized as a 'symbol manipulator',

a definition that emerged early in the history of computing and fits with the usage of the machine since its invention in the 40s to 1980s, said jay david bolter 1993.

still i like number cruncher more.

i can just do that. it's also another capital of the business idea "buying names", this time yahoo. tesler is also part of the history of dynabook, notetaker and newton, which i still have in use.

Larry Tesler has maintained a consistent presence in the field of computer usability since its inception by contributing to virtually every stage of the user interface's evolution. During his stint at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970s, Tesler developed a "document compiler" capable of formatting text and producing footnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies, which became a precursor of Dynamic HTML.

Tesler's tenure at the Palo Alto Research Center was marked by achievements such as a paper he co-wrote in which he first brought up the concepts of cut-and-paste and the representation of content as icons. Another major accomplishment was the development of Gypsy, a modeless user interface for text editing that featured cut-and-paste, fill-in forms to enter search terms, bold and italic type styles, text selection via mouse, click-to-open files, and what-you-see-is-what-you-get printing. Tesler went from PARC to Apple Computer, where he was extensively involved in the development of Lisa, the first commercially sold PC to use windows, icons, and a mouse.

He also worked on the Macintosh project in an unofficial capacity, providing constructive criticism on the Mac user interface that led to far-reaching design decisions, such as the placement of the menu bar on the top and folders and documents on the screen. As vice president of Apple's Advanced Technology Group, Tesler oversaw the initial development of a fully-functional handheld Mac, which he terminated to concentrate on the Newton handheld PC, which was a failure. He later spun off the Cocoa object-oriented programming language into a company where it was developed into software that enabled schoolchildren with no programming skills to easily create simulations and video games, which is still in use today. In May, Tesler joined Yahoo as vice president of user experience and design. (acm technews

ieee has more on larry tesler