Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS:

https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html

As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolute best talent in the entire country, and unified them towards a goal of pure exploratory research with no market pressure, with all the excesses of 1980s Japan.

A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.

Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote:

"If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan:

- enter a market

- become a monopoly

- use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality"

A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising.

0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...

Getting "too many requests" at the moment.

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