Am 05.11.2010 19:23, schrieb Valessio Brito:
My Opinion: 4. The Lisp Machine[4], a proposal is noisy, dark and mechanics. Lack the human touch. My proposal for a vote: Each proposal must have an objective presentation of inspiration and creation. The interpretation or vision of creation is interesting to see if it corresponds to Debian.
Thanks for criticising. I try to answer and to present my idea. Sorry if it's a bit lengthy.
I wouldn't put technology in a position where it stands against humanity or a human touch. In contrary: Deeply human ideas can be the driving force for technological development - think of the AT&T charta: "The general route of the lines of this association will connect one or more points in each and every city, town or place in the State of New York... with one or more points in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada and Mexico; and each and every of said cities, towns and places is to be connected with each and every other city, town or place in said states and countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means, with the rest of the known world." What an idea. To connect everyone with everyone. In 1923.
Another idea like this was written down in August 1983: The plan to build "a complete Unix-compatible software system for standard hardware architectures, to be shared freely with everyone". Richard Stallman wrote these lines on the first pages of his "Lisp Machine Window Manual". He hid the idea in a computer manual, one month before he went public with it in his famous "Free Unix!" mail. The idea to enable people to develop and work with software in a community, where everyone is free to share ideas and contribute.
The Lisp Machine on the photograph, on which my theme is based, may look dark and mechanical (and even a bit dusty). But it's the product of years of work of a human being, of Richard Greenblatt, once called "hacker of hackers".
In his book "Hackers" Steven Levy describes Greenblatt as student in 1963: "He was turning out an incredible amount of code, hacking as much as he could, or sitting with a stack of print-outs, marking them up. He'd shuttle between the PDP-1 and TMRC, with his head fantastically wired with the structures of the program he was working on (...). To hold that concentration for a long period of time, he lived, as did several of his peers, the thirty-hour day. It was conducive to intense hacking, since you had an extended block of waking hours to get going on a program, and, once you were really rolling, little annoyances like sleep need not bother you. The idea was to burn away for thirty hours, reach total exhaustion, then go home and collapse for twelve hours. An alternative would be to collapse right there in the lab.“
Some may call this inhuman. And its not healthy anyway. But I think it is just freedom. To fully explore logical problems and to solve them the most elegant way. To hand-assemble a machine like the one on the photograph. And not to stop until it is perfect.
This is what I tried to photograph and to put in my artwork. And I think it's obvious why I think it would be a great fit for Debian GNU/Linux.
thanks for reading this, regards Ulrich