<It was possible to spend more >than $100k for a Symbolics >Lisp Machine with accelerated >color graphics and HDTV >in/out.

Quantel Harry was the competition.

Link below, is for the 1981 Quantel Paintbox, the existence of which is responsible for the direction of my juvenile mind.

I should love to one day get together with like minded folk and assemble a complete ca. '89 broadcast graphics suite. I'm in advertising (London, independent, founder) and I'm not convinced that I couldn't work out the financial arithmetic favourably. I am persuaded by artist friends of the merit, tempered I expect by the reality of the working interfaces, if they actually used a 80s Quantel - we take instantaneous responsiveness for granted.. Time and place required, but I'm serious enough to have scouted premises and allocated budget.

I digress. Sorry.

I only have read about Pharo in the last couple of weeks, but I am taken by the sophistication of the ambitions and delivery thereof. I say this here, rather thanon a Pharo list, because I am unsure of what skills and specialities are required, but I have a professional itch to scratch, which is estimating the work of supporting a new language to the fullest extent possible, in Visual Studio. If this could be accomplished in under half a man year for a senior developer, I really want to know. (result to be released to community, purpose of exercise purely personal curiosity about what consequent effect is possible)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

My impression is that Quantal was more or less about 2d paint and compositing.

The Symbolics Graphics System was more about 3d modeling and animation for TV and games. Paint was also provided - but also in combination with animation.

A very early brochure: http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html

A later one in German: http://lispm.de/symbolics-2/symbolics-2.html

I must add the Bangladesh Civil War, 1971-87 , to the pogrom count, the other way around. Calcutta Brahmin Hindu families intermarried and converted to Islam. The Muslims were supposed to go to Pakistan, as it became. But the ties were deeper than just family; Calcutta was a technical powerhouse in its prime. Skilled workers couldn't find work outside the community, which of course moved to East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The numbers were not few, and the fact that the war is officially dated to the first year of Independence, is the start of the most sorrowful tale. Three million women and children were killed or perished. Veterans of that war, ten years ago, suddenly were allowed to immigrate to the UK and America. The UK dropped the prohibition of entry and settlement, of elderly, infirm, uneducated and dependant relatives. I have friends whose futures were ruined, as the burden, despite having free healthcare and extremely generous benefits, if you have cooperative society, which in a majority ghetto concentration, you can rely on as friendly, my friends watched younger siblings lose education and housing chances, the family resources depleted entirely. Caring for unwell elderly is not compatible with the part time jobs which young mothers and school age children forwent to be on hand to attend often multiple great grandparents and even aunts and uncles. THE EFFECTS ARE CATASTROPHIC the strictly patriarchal Bengali society was obedient to elders who alienated the younger population from general society. The youngest are growing up in houses no longer bilingual, but Bengali only for avoidance of offense to the elders. The elder men collect voting cards. Twenty five, in my friends family. I see families suffering from organised indignities. I see racial discrimination in sensitive positions like social workers, who are largely another race altogether. Unusual in i predominantly, 80% Bengali area. We have frightening frequency of forcible adoption and removed from mothers and the most amazingly brazen aggressive and fraudulent routine abuse of Family Division of the High Court. I experienced this obviously through friends but then with my mother because I fought in Court Pro bono and started winning the kinds of cases that sicken me to know many go unchallenged. I became unwell as a result.

I suspect that this is because a human propensity exists to allocate and apportion blame, particularly in cases where the interactions involved in the immediately prior actions are unclear.

I have actually not even once encountered this 5 Why's method.

I neither heard of it before.

But I founded my company in 1996, starting out with almost two hundred years of experience surrounding my incredulous and lucky younger self, including several PhDs and former Fortune 500 board members.

I will hazard that this 5whys technique is fundamentally flawed and easily susceptible to manipulation for procuring a scapegoat.

I only hope that explains why I have never encountered this before. I hope moreso I can feel a little like something​was going on in the right way, in my business, to filter and reject what I think is, and definitely comes across as bogus to me.

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe.

So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste.

This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email.

Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have been killing off email and all forms of communication that require any configuration, lately?

Edit: configuration, not confirmation

Haven't you just described a blog though?

Sounds more like a newsletter to me. Let people subscribe to the newsletter, send out an email blast once a day/week/month.

But then by RSS, which makes it a web thing, which sure sounds like a blog.

I haven't thought of WiFi as a available infrastructure until this year, the development was so slow to arrive I missed it actually coming.

And this is the City Of London, I live close enough to consider the city home.

Ironically, I only noticed the ubiquity of WiFi in the city as a result of testing the lowest end phone and prepaid options possible. This is in reaction to the most ridiculous dispute with my contract network provider, over the fate of the premium number I've used for a long long time being held hostage. I only wanted it to move to another account..

I remember the Palms very well. At the time I carried a treasured HP 209LX, secretly wishing for a Psion 5 keyboard but not their systems environment. (I had the HP a while if you note the overlap)

I wish I could find the story again, but I think the sadness was just the classical combination of blunt management and silicon valley egos.

This is the canonical answer for every technological near miss, isn't it?

I mean cost driven aggressive B School management plus idealistic impatient but always sufficiently talented to change the world software and hardware Engineers, Always Always Always the same, WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP DOING IT??!!!

I honestly care about the answer, because I thought this was the past and not the normal, when I learned to program, oh, thirty five years ago...

As for the infrastructure WiFi...

The Result has been I learned that I am almost entirely independent of any cellular carrier network for my voice connectivity.

I haven't quite yet, but I actually could drop the Networks out of my life!

The UK is blessed with a ISP called Andrews and Arnold, www.aaisp.net who will port my (once freed) precious memorable number to a SIM card that resides on their MVNO. This cuts my recurring payment to merely £2.40pcm! And, as desired, I can have more lines on that number. I must avoid starting in how good AAISP really is. If you want to be recognised by voice when you call, and get enterprise grade services, please mention John owes Phil Boddy one, and hadn't forgotten...

Oh, and my Networks- free telephonic life?

I am seriously contemplating whether it's worth the hassle of applying to install a VHF/UHF D-STAR Repeater, which our building management seems happy to let us do, to cover the Bank / St. Paul's areas.

AAISP let you port your number (any number, cellular numbers are new) to their VOIP services. I can route them as I please, so apart from the slight lack of duplex, why not over HAM RADIO? I have figured out how to use a freephone number to call in and take over the call, from a payphone, and the idea amuses me greatly. But the fact is, I'd rather carry a dedicated WiFi access device that provides me with use of a headset and the radio /audio processing power possible in a shoulder strapped battery and module, than I would carry another$1000 phone obsolete the moment the manufacturer cares to not update it.

I guess I'd just love to be serious about putting my call sign on my business card!

I'm reading Michael Bloomberg's autobiography, and he describes working his last day as a partner at Salomon Brothers, a twelve hour day, to end fifteen years of twelve hour days, six day weeks. He was not unhappy in his work.

What I find confusing, is the extension of work into outside hours, on call.

9-5 office workers are supposed to be able to complete only 2 hours undistracted work during their day. This figure comes up time and time again despite the original study of American workplaces was long before we had computers and modern distractions universally.

Is there a acknowledgement of the value of the on tap working capacity, implicitly in this insidious invasion of outside life from work?

Because I have been understanding the constant on call expectations of employers to be in effect a admission of the end of necessity for offices.

As in, "sure I'll make sure to respond to your demands 24/7, now I just won't commute four hours a day costing me £7,000 for the train tickets, to only spend a couple of hours a day doing actual work for you!"

This is quite the indictment of the way we manage our business, is it not?

Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.

The consumer pricing structures, when you start getting services like Dropbox used extensively in professional settings, such as graphic design for advertising, is a problem. When we've got to go back to the original files with a press deadline that's​missed at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, where do we expect to find the customer service, if we're impacted by a degraded node in Dropbox's cloud? I accept the problem is with the community of freelance designers, and equally the disinterest if agencies and other line of business data consumers to provide adequate alternatives (we do, with real enterprise grade systems and support contracts) but even Draconian measures to enforce control only back up a community who have been backed up and disenfranchised plenty enough by the large agencies pushing work off the payroll for the length of my career (decades...) and it just happens to be a hard sell to make any extra work for a highly talented community who are now treated as least cost providers.

Only if the diffuser is in the optical chain and not the surface target at the focal plane of a projection.

Whenever we crumple our eyes up to squint we're creating a diffraction grating that works a treat for the myopic amnesiac I am when without my spectacles.

The ground glass of the focusing screen in my Nikon is diffuse. This particular diffusion assists with guaging the lens focus, bit only for smaller apertures than f/2.0, so that expensive 85mm f/1.4 prime lenses need autofocus. Dunno how I managed for two decades professionally before the digital switch rendered great optics practically redundant*

So what's preventing the projection of the high resolution display information into a kind of focusing screen like the old fashioned Single Lens Reflex cameras won the market with in the fifties and sixties?

Is it more physical constraints of the imposition of the display into the field of vision for infinity focus?

If long ago my amateur interest would have carried my thinking further, sadly I have no applicable reading even on the subjects, so forgive me if this is a beginner supposition in error.

I certainly see the opportunity to directly encourage the hardware development, even if the equipment will be unwieldy to use, even more so than today, for specialist fields such as fabric design and magazine printing. I have been involved in the latter for the entirety of my career, two decades of that running the company I hoped would open up enormous markets and that field even defenestrated Google in 2004, leading to the most epic narrative and pivot story if I manage to get things kicking again. * Surely there is a very good overlap between the current generation of customers for whom the budget simply isn't the obstacle, and the same customers who will allocate whatever you want to charge in the future, if you can deliver real advantages? I'm optimistic about VR, but not in any kind of short term horizon. I founded my own business on a thirty year plan.. that still could be met, and made decades one and two, kinda just the latter. Maybe this is what we all need: real long term benefit analysis and commitment. This isn't a factor of the youthfulness of the Valley to which short termism is often ascribed,when flighty CEOs are discounted, I was very young and junior by a generation and some to my co-founder, when I realized how I had found my calling. Surely the VR sector has plenty of similar thinkers young enough to put such time to their dreams?

*I kinda continue a bit in my profile, where I may be more bold soon. I welcome any feedback or inquiry, I may be less than the epitome of clarity when I come close to professional engagement with ideas I can't believe.. the industry hasn't destroyed my hopes because of politics not technology, not yet anyhow..

This was the first thought I had, also, but from a optimistic point of view:

If you are interested in modelling the behaviour of a modern fabric loom, which can be a four storey high proposition with thousands of spindles feeding air guided bobbins, where the weight of the threads in your weave design affects the entire process, the way your thread hangs requires a different tension, how it stretches affects the feed and speed with which the bobbin can fly through the weft (vertical line frame into which the pattern is woven) and the elasticity and friction tension the weft sometimes intentionally... I am willing to bet it would suit me if the visual rendering is put on ASICS or FPGAs, while the physical modelling for cloth behaviour might be a more general purpose solution.