Red Martian
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2014–2026
29:16 · 14K views · Aug 8, 2013
A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.
HN cites it as a startling example of how advanced Lisp machine interactive graphics were, often in Lisp and REPL-driven development discussions.
15 comments from Hacker News
For whatever reason I really enjoyed the Symbolics graphics and animations demo[0] linked in the article. I was born in the 90s and have constantly heard the narrative that technological progress is getting faster and faster, and that we're currently at the forefront. And then I see something like this. They had basically photoshop before I was even alive!? [0] this video
Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [LINK] "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" this video "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] "The Interlisp programming environment" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]
See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: [LINK] this video It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.
I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: this video
You're very welcome. Computer graphics has a very interesting history, and like many things, there's a lot to learn from studying it. Surprisingly, many techniques and principles are still relevant to this day. Thankfully, the Internet is full of documentation, post-mortem accounts and reference implementations to learn more about all this. Here's a bunch of random noteworthy things and references I forgot to link (sorry for potentially digging rabbit holes): The best information tends to come from official documentation detailing almost everything you want to know about the inner workings of systems. Additionally, unofficial community documentation can also be of great quality and complement official sources. The architecture overview posts from Rodrigo Copetti ( [LINK] ) pack a lot of accurate information at a glance, and are a great starting point if a specific topic piques your interest. The Resident Evil 2 microcode post-mortem: [LINK] Improved lighting, reverberation, Dolby surround and MP3 microcodes from Rare: [LINK] H.264 decoding microcode: [LINK] The Reality Signal Processor's programming guide: [LINK] Emulators' progress reports can reveal a lot about the details and intricacies required for accurately replicating these systems' features: [LINK] is one such amazing source of information, but all other major emulation efforts have equally interesting content. Transparency sorting of surfaces ( [LINK] ) is a hard problem to solve for traditional scanline renderers (