On 2023-07-04, Eric Swenson <eric@swenson.org> wrote:
> On Monday, July 3, 2023 at 11:35:04 AM UTC-7, Bill E wrote:
>> My first post to this group, got here because I'm (im)patiently waiting for the Lars PDP-10 kit. I used a 10 at MIT back in the early 70's. ITS was the OS, and EMACS was the editor of choice.
>
> My editor of choice on the ‘10 was emacs, which I’ve been using constantly since 1976. My programming language of choice was (and still is) MacLisp although recently I’ve been coding a bunch in Muddle (MDL). I, too, started on ITS and Multics — and still use both daily, with emulators, of course. ITS MacLisp has support for making system calls, so one doesn’t need to resort to Midas and MACRO, unless you need efficiency in space and speed.

I'm curious about Maclisp under ITS. So, in theory, you could interface with networking
sockets with Maclisp? Could a Gopher client be written under Maclisp even if one
would have to hand-write most of the networking code, a la DOS with mTCP?

Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

I'm curious about Maclisp under ITS. So, in theory, you could
interface with networking sockets with Maclisp?

Yes.

Could a Gopher client be written under Maclisp ...

Yes. (Why Gopher?)

You might have to write a little bit of assembler to get access of one
or two esoteric system calls, but MacLisp made doing that pretty easy.

- Alan

On 2024-04-05, Alan Bawden <alan@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> writes:
>
> I'm curious about Maclisp under ITS. So, in theory, you could
> interface with networking sockets with Maclisp?
>
> Yes.
>
> Could a Gopher client be written under Maclisp ...
>
> Yes. (Why Gopher?)
>
> You might have to write a little bit of assembler to get access of one
> or two esoteric system calls, but MacLisp made doing that pretty easy.
>
> - Alan
>

Gopher it's one of the easiest protocols out there among IRC, and it would
make lots of ITS machines (either emulated or the FPGA one) a bit more useful
even if there are several better machines out there.
The gopher specs won't change overnight, and there's lots of overlap
between several retro communities.

For instance, you can read news thru gopher://magical.fish,
and there's tons of 'phlogs' and documentation out there.
Gopher://sdf.org it's the best example.
Anyone could, for example, set up an ITS related gopher hole with
extra documentation, guides and so on.

Also, it could make transferring files to ITS trivial.

Here's a web server written in Maclisp.

http://up.dfupdate.se/hack/httpd%20%3E
http://up.dfupdate.se/hack/ltcstr%20%3E