> The CPU had been financed by DARPA and one of the applications thought was adding a Compact Lisp Machine into a fighter plane, running an AI-based co-pilot, based on a large research project (Pilot's Associate).

So is that why everybody called it the "TI Exploder"? I always assumed it was because they occasionally exploded, not because they made other things explode!

https://cl-pdx.com/comp.lang.lisp/1988/apr/553.html#:~:text=...

http://computer-programming-forum.com/50-lisp/e1910d32684c7e...

https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/sdf.org/0/users/kickmule/unix...

(Oh wow cool, by googling for "TI Exploder" I found those old unix-haters archives, with some of my old sarcastic Unix Weenie / X-Windows / Perl combo-rants from '91, that I'd completely forgotten about! Including DSHR's epic "Sun Deskset == Roy Lichtenstein Painting on your Bedroom Wall" rant that somebody with the initials DH leaked. https://blog.dshr.org/ ) ... I'll transclude the highlights since it perfectly illustrates what Liam was getting at in the article and his comments here:

Date: Thu, 8 Aug 91 18:20:00 PDT
From: DH
Subject: Simple Unix Weenie Question

Date: Thu, 8 Aug 91 20:50:26 EDT
From: J

> =+= Gee, I can't seem to convince a shell script or a
> program to change my working directory. This makes some
> sense, given how Unix handles programs (as separate
> processes). But when I put "cd" in a shell script, it
> works for the duration of the shell script, and then
> reverts back to where I was before.

So, what's wrong with that? running a shell script
forks off another shell, and when it terminates, you are
returned to where your parent shell left you. If you
want to end up in another directory, use an alias.

The elegant approach is for the subshell to open /dev/mem
and change the directory of its parent process
directly. Another popular approach is for both shells to
open connections to the X server, select for property notify
events on screen 0, and negotiate an incremental selection
transfer in a manner acceptable to both the parent process,
child process, and the X Consortium Office of Management and
Budget, falling back on the system wide default directory
(which you must be running automounter to access) in case
the server returns a BadAlloc error.

From: DH
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 91 19:07:55 PDT
Subject: Simple Unix Weenie Question

Oh yeah, in case you were wondering how to open an X
connection from the shell, you have to be running
"xperlsh". But since it runs your .xperlshrc file through
the C preprocessor first, you have to make sure you have an
ANSII cpp in your path supporting ## style macro
concatination, but other than that it's pretty much like you
would expect.

(But of course you have to set your path up right first, so
you need to set the "SkipAheadOnErrorsAndTryAgainSomeOtherTime"
option to xperlsh in your .xperlshinit file, which is
sourced by your session manager (so naturally you have to
restart the window system before it takes effect.).)

Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 18:01:14 PDT
Subject: I Love Working At Sun ...

-- Customers are really stupid: if you dump on them they
quit buying your product ;-/

- Author's name withheld (not me).

From: DH
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 14:18:19 PDT
Subject: dr on Deskset

Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 09:39:51 PST
From: OD
To: tt
Subject: fyi

Hmmm...

----- Begin Included Message -----

>From kh
From: kh
To: ws
Subject: dr on Deskset

From: DR
Date: 18 Oct 90 17:02:39 GMT
Newsgroups: sun.open-windows
Subject: Re: Deskset environment

[NS replied to me directly. Her reply illustrates the
reasons why I sent out yesterday's mail so perfectly that
I'm taking the liberty of copying my reply to
openwindows-interest]

> When we give standard Deskset presentations, a couple of
> things tend to "dazzle" the audience ...
>
> 1. Use the MT Calendar template to generate an
> appointment. Mail it to yourself, then
> drop it onto CM which will schedule it. The
> template is totally hokey (we're working on
> it) but it works and is wizzy.
>
> 2. Build a small application with GUIDE and make it
> on the spot. Show it up and running on XView
> in minutes. You can talk to BW about that
>

Thank you, but you have completely missed the point. I
don't want to show people how whizzy the standard default
desktop environment is. That's your job.

I want to give a talk about a quite different subject. I
merely want to *use* the desktop environment to achieve my
own ends. And as soon as I try to actually *use* it for
something instead of merely showing off the glitz, it falls
to pieces in my hands. Unfortunately, this is becoming all
too common in Sun products these days, because we no longer
*use* the things we build for anything but whizzy demos.

Have you ever actually tried to *use* the desktop for
anything? Like, say, printing a PostScript file? The
answer has to be no - because dropping a PostScript file on
the print tool doesn't work. Or binding a shell command to
a pattern? Again no, because doing so depends on
undocumented features of /etc/filetype. Even trying to
create a new icon from the standard set causes the icon
editor to dump core. I'm not joking when I say that I've
been filing a bug report every couple of hours of trying to
use the desktop. Its this kind of fragility that shows me
that I'm treading on fresh snow. No-one else has walked
this way.

And that is a truly sad commentary on the state of Sun -
no-one has been this way because no-one believes that
there's anything worth doing over this way. The reason Unix
was such an advance over previous operating systems was that
you could customize your environment in arbitrary ways.
With just a few shell scripts, for example. Its just like
the cold war - in our anxiety to compete with the enemy
we've ended up losing the things that made our way of life
worth defending in the first place. Like the freedom to
disagree with the authorities.

> I believe you're correct in saying that most people live
> with the default environment, but I think it's only partly
> because they don't know how to customize it. We've done
> some user testing and, surprisingly, people either prefer
> the default environment or just don't want to take the
> time to make it special. This is particularly true of
> people like admins, marketing, etc.

Testing whether people actually do customize their
environment is beside the point. Of course they don't. In
order to do it, I have to write C code using bizarre
features of Xview, exercise all my shell wizardry, and
dredge up undocumented features of the system from the
source. And you're suprised when admins can't do this? I
don't expect admins to do it. But I do expect ISVs and
Sun's SEs to be able to do it, and right now they can't.

PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.

----- End Included Message -----

From: DH
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 12:43:59 PDT
Subject: Forwarding Messages

Please don't forward that message about the deskset around.
It is only for the enjoyment of people who truly hate Unix.
Since the incredible bogosity of Unix is one of the best
kept "open secrets" of the industry, I assumed that this was
a relativly private mailing list.

From: DC
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 12:53:32 -0700
Subject: Getting People Fired

Well, it also made you some friends here.

Yes; apparently quite a number of them. Perhaps in fact it
was a net gain!

From: DH
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 91 08:27:49 EST
Subject: Once Again, Weenix Unies Reinvent History

Yesterday Rob Pike from Bell Labs gave a talk on the latest
and greatest successor to unix, called Plan 9. Basically he
described ITS's mechanism for using file channels to control
resources as if it were the greatest new idea since the
wheel.

There may have been more; I took off after he credited Unix
with the invention of the hierarchial file system!

The other archive contains the whole 1990 thread about ESR rewriting the JARGON file!

https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/sdf.org/0/users/kickmule/unix...

Date: Fri, 14 Dec 1990 13:54 EST
From: DH
Subject: Re: MC:HUMOR;JARGON >

The JARGON file is being updated. The guy doing so has
changed the nasty references to Unix to refer to MS-DOS
because "all the ITS partisans have now become Unix
partisans, since the Unix philosophy is the same as the
ITS philosophy." as he says.

Date: Fri, 14 Dec 1990 16:57-0500
From: KP
Subject: Re: MC:HUMOR;JARGON >

Isn't there some pending federal law against colorizing
things that were originally black and white? Perhaps we
should each call our congresspeople and lobby for its
immediate passage of that so we can go after this vandal in
court...

Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 15:04:18 EST
From: MT
Subject: Re: MC:HUMOR;JARGON >

This guy is also a flaming political loony, so make sure to
mention that you're an agent of the international communist
conspiracy if you write to him (unless you're trying to be
persuasive, in which case you should claim to be a sworn
enemy of the ICC).

Date: 27 Dec 90 07:17:26 GMT
From: ESR
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

For the record, I have been a GNU contributor and supporter since 1982.

From: DH
Date: 28 Dec 90 22:08:22 GMT

Um, for the record, there wasn't any GNU project in 1982.

Date: Tue, 1 Jan 91 17:25:11 EST
From: RS
Subject: This Is What Worries Me

Eric the Flute's credibility has just taken another
nose-dive... you would expect someone who claims to be a
purveyor of net history and lore to at least get the dates
right when he's lying...

From: ESR
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 91 19:44:17 EST
Subject: Re: This Is What Worries Me

In recent spewage, dh calls me a liar for writing that
I've been a GNU contributor and supporter since 1982.

My history with GNU spans its entire lifetime to date (most
recently, RMS accepted an SCCS control mode into the
libraries for v19 EMACS). It's possible that the project
had an official start time that postdates 1982, but I was
involved before that, when the project was just a gleam in
RMS's eye (by 1982 I'd already known him for four years).

He's welcome to ask RMS when I volunteered the code that
became GNU sed. That was before the project had even
definitely settled on the GNU name.

RMS may even recall that I was one of the first people --
possibly *the* first -- to urge that an EMACS implementation
be the flagship product of his embryonic project.

I can only assume that gumby's remarks are a function of
ignorance and his expressed distate for the Jargon File
revision I am currently undertaking. I leave it for others
to judge whether any juxtaposition of the above facts with
GNU's official history justifies a vindictive flame. --
>>eric>>

From: AB
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 91 21:09:08 EST
Subject: But DH didn't know Mr. Raymond was on unix-haters!

For the moment I have removed Mr. Raymond from
unix-haters. If anyone wants to put him back, they should
first give him a crystal clear explanation of the boundaries
of discussion, and they should also warn the rest of us in
advance so that we can avoid repeating dh's faux pas.

Personally, I think it's kind of inhibiting to have
"prominent Unix personalities" on unix-haters. It's hard to
work up a really good flame about clueless, twinkie-crazed,
brain damaged unix weenies when you have to worry that you
might offend someone.

This is not a list for the faint of heart. Accuracy is
-not- required on unix-haters. Unix-haters requires only
hatred.

(Of course accuracy does have its role. Nothing improves a
really good anti-Unix rant more than the knowledge that the
eye-popping misfeature in question really does work
-exactly- as described.)