Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes.
Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7).
Your question about who decides what gets loaded into the context window is close to something I've been experimenting with. I worked on the original Sims, and I'm now developing MOOLLM, which is roughly The Sims crossed with LambdaMOO, running on an LLM.
The connection to Leary is quite literal. MOOLLM has a Mind Mirror skill, an extension of the Anthropic Skills approach to character and location simulation, meets the Self prototype based object system. It draws on Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror, the game published by Electronic Arts, alongside Sims-style personality traits and needs.
Leary's earlier work on the Interpersonal Circumplex and personality inventories supplies another connection to your question about control. There's the story of him recognizing his own psychological testing framework during prison intake and answering strategically to obtain a minimum-security classification, from which he subsequently escaped the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. Understanding how the system represented him helped him change what the system allowed him to do. Practical applications include prison escapes, and computer games too. ;)
I'm using these ideas as an editable vocabulary for exploring personalities, relationships, and different interpretations of a situation, not as a scientific model of consciousness or a way to diagnose people.
What interested me about The Sims wasn't just watching simulated people. It was being able to build their environment, change it while they were living in it, and discover how their behavior changed. LambdaMOO brought a related idea into a shared, programmable world: the inhabitants could also be its builders.
In MOOLLM, directories represent rooms, files hold objects and character state, and the LLM interprets descriptions and behavioral instructions. The world persists outside the context window, but any particular interaction brings only part of it into context. Deciding what to retrieve, summarize, remember, or leave out becomes part of constructing the character's perspective.
I want that construction to be inspectable and editable. You should be able to look at the character description, memories, and instructions that were supplied, change them, and try the situation again. That doesn't reveal the model's internal workings, but it does let you examine and manipulate some of the conditions shaping its response.
So your "God's admin panel" made me smile. I'm interested in building one for these little worlds, and letting people move between playing a character, designing the environment, and examining the simulation -- even importing and exporting characters between games, and "llmulating" them in LLM driven microworld simulations like moollm. You don't have to believe our universe is simulated to learn something by building one you can take apart.
The moollm soul-city skill, inspired by something Will Wright said in 1996 about data portability:
This is fascinating. I’m intrigued by the combination of discursive metaphor and weak convention to define actor identities.
The writing style is not natural to me. I was initially put off by phrases like “YAML Jazz” even though I love Tron’s “digital jazz”. Maybe this is because I’ve never experienced psychedelics. I’m at least two generations beyond / behind - removed? - from the movement that defined this way of thinking and communicating.
But sitting with it, it makes sense. I have to stretch my brain. It feels like thinking through a new algorithm… except I’m juggling jello instead of assembling a puzzle.
Ultimately it aligns with my understanding of AI as xkcd’s stirred pile of linear algebra. LLMs don’t understand anything. They project words into probability space, infer momentum vectors based on chunks that bubbling up in the soup of digested everything, and strike out in the prognosticated direction with blind confidence constrained only by temperature.
We constrain these systems with sandboxes and sturdy deterministic tools. Prompts default to the same shape: sharp, precise, hard, directive. But maybe a bag of words is also valid.
If the computer knows your references, each token is much richer than I might assume. Does “minsky” vendor the psychedelic moment? Does “SIMS” scaffold a game loop worth of the emotional energy people have poured into that series? Do these combine to elevate Claude, Qwen, or any other multi-million-dollar number box into an engaging partner?
It seems that to you, Rick Polito's "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again" (i.e. the summary for "The Wizard of Oz") would not have actual grounds. There are obvious factual relations between computing engines and that topic.
there's LSD, and there's LSD, but you heard that and know that. And I don't mean quality Hoffman "LSD 25" vs city part of town cook & shitty storage but purposefully bad formulas.
Or when some kids are invited to parties and everybody else dropped twice the amount when the door opens and then everyone thinks it's a joke the new kids can't interface with the absolute garbage of bags of words that miss any point whatsoever. ...
wait a minute, holy shit! The PC IS LSD.
But it's a 9/10 thing all the way up and down. "There's a bigger fish, better quality, better design" but the few percent pumping out creative, productive and ludicrously progressive stuff are in none of these funnbunny-nice-to-see-you-again groups ...
bad roll, bad luck, what a waste of time these cultures, authors and books were, holy shit
Thanks for writing this up! "Autodesk is not the street" is a wonderful reply. I appreciate having your account and the actual letters to separate what happened from the story that grew around it.
I also remember you developing something called Warp (not IBM's ill-fated operating system), if I have the name right -- an early predecessor to QuickTime VR. Am I remembering that correctly?
Your description of the EyePhone, Polhemus tracker, and data glove brought back memories of VPL and Body Electric, which I later worked on as Bounce. There’s a rich history of Forth running through VR, graphics, and live performance that I’d love to compare notes about.
I knew Michael Perry through Laxen and Perry Forth (and Strawberry Music Festival), which Mitch Bradley built on in developing Forthmacs and Sun Forth, leading to Open Firmware. There’s Young Harvill’s Swivel 3D, written in Forth, in the VPL world too.
And the late Marc de Groot developed Meme, the Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment: a multi-user networked virtual-world system programmed in multitasking Forth. His June 1994 announcement emphasized portable executable behavior for objects, not just geometry, with code that could travel efficiently over the network. I dug up his website and announcement and posted them here (including some Tales of the Great TCL Wars):
And here is his patent on Meme, which has 53 citations, including Philip Rosedal's Distributed Simulation patent (who made Second Life and High Fidelity):
Another wonderful part of this history is Coco and Peter Conn’s HOMER & Associates. They hired Forth, Inc. to program their Homer II visual mixing console, and got Chuck Moore himself to write the host software!
Paul Rother worked alongside Chuck, learning Forth and programming the individual visual channels. The console had 24 channels with their own Z80s, a master Z80 running multitasking PolyForth in 32K, touch-sensitive sliders, and a “joystick bumper” like a Mustang gearshift. You could perform visual sequences, record them, and overdub corrections like an audio mix, then take the recording and slide trays to the optical printer.
Paul later got a CAT-700 framebuffer running as a Forth paint system alongside the optical-printer controls. Coco remembers its early use on Abracadabra and Atomic Dog.
I posted Coco’s and Paul’s accounts to Hacker News with Coco’s permission:
I’ve been bringing Forth and hand-controlled graphics together again on a somewhat unlikely machine: a PDP-7 running in the browser.
Mitch Bradley and Claude recently wrote a beautiful PDP-7 Forth in one day. Its inner interpreter takes three instructions, using XCT to execute thread cells whose opcodes select the behavior. I integrated it into my Cabinet PDP-7 emulator, with a Type 340 vector display, Mitch's 3D turtle written in Forth, and an emulated fictional hand-tracking peripheral, as if the Data Glove + Polhemus existed in 1967, that plugs into the PDP-7 cabinet with its own IOT instructions wrapped with a Forth API.
The browser tracks your hand with the webcam and exposes the coordinates through PDP-7 device registers. Forth running inside the emulated machine reads those registers and draws the hand. The camera processing stays in the browser; only tracking numbers enter the emulated machine, converted to 18 bit integers in the scale compatible with the Forth lookup table trig words and turtle graphics coordinate system. The hand tracking library uses floating point, so the idea is to have the virtual hardware interface do all the pre-processing so it's convenient to program in Forth.
Here’s ULTIMATE HAND, implemented in PDP-7 assembly and Forth:
It’s Minsky and Shannon's Ultimate (aka Useless) Machine, except your hand becomes its hand. Allow the camera, hold up your hand with your palm away and fingers up, and the box opens and carries your hand toward the switch. Touch the switch with a fingertip and it retreats into the box. The arm positions the hand, but you control its finger shapes.
Simple Forth data hand tester (point the light pen at the fingers to see their names -- the tooltips are in the 340 display user interface overlay, not drawn by the PDP-7):
The Ultimate Machine itself is an emulated fictional PDP-7 device with its own IOT instructions to inspect and control it, whose only purpose is to turn itself off (through a state machine with configurable delays), which exposes its state to the PDP-7 so it can render an animated view with vector turtle graphics with Forth:
And it wouldn't be classically Turing Complete without a Turing Machine co-processor device -- a lot like the 340 display -- with its own IOTs and instruction set via DMA, that represents code and tape in PDP-7 memory. When it runs off the end of the tape window, it tapefaults: (temporarily) halting and sending an interrupt to the PDP-7, so it can implement virtual infinite tape memory, potentially using compression, extended memory, or other devices like disk or paper tape:
Here's a demo of other stuff the PDP-7 emulator can do, including displaying the source code and scans of the line printer listing from 1971 of the original code it's executing:
That was an inspiration for my NeWS PostScript visual programming and debugging environment, the PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer, and the paper I wrote about it in 1989 quotes Gibson:
Abstract:
The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.
Introduction:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ....
[Gibson, Neuromancer]
Too bad the PC was more like PCP, the only drug that everything the government tell your about it is true. And Elon Musk's favorite excuse for pissing his pants all the time.
Cyberspace is defined with the word "hallucination", and Gibson spent 1977-1983 writing his short fiction and first novel on the subject. The degree to which he was influenced by psychedelic culture is open to debate, but I agree that it was non-zero. I think Grateful Dead tapes is your own projection, however. Bob Marley is more likely as muse-ic.
DUB opened the portal to outer dimensions for people too afraid of LSD. They emerge pretty much at the same time, and also DUB is quite psychedelic on its own.
It is a long strange read, but 'the electric koolaid acid test' has passages in it relating conversations about our computerised present AND the development of AI, all the way back to 1963 and very much on the bus, the Dead were playing live in the house and at the tests, and no doubt on the roof of the bus.
Keasy as the non leader, it's all there written down in dayglo and ultraviolet, tapes, film, photos, and the movie.
Marley's sceen was adjacent, they got there amp tech from the same crews building for the Dead, but rock steady is all there own.
I saw that Autodesk VR setup. They had ping-pong working. There was serious thought about how to do CAD work in VR. But it was like trying to do mechanical drawing while wearing oven mitts. Precision work with hands in open air is just not human-compatible. But a lot of people at the time did think it was the future.
Hey, thanks for reminding me about that. We were inspired by Atari's Pong, to which I had devoted many quarters at the bar during my undergrad days.
Nolan Bushnell came to visit Autodesk at our invitation, and we gave him a demo of our 3D version of Pong. Later, Nolan gave me some of my first business lessons at a meeting held at the Thai Garden restaurant at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino. Memories...
I agree that VR isn't the best modality for precision CAD work, although it can be great for visualization. These days I just dictate what I want using a local Whisper instance, have Hemes-webui get my local LLM to write Python code, and then let FreeCAD generate the geometry. For me, that works much better than drawing in midair.
Precision work with hands can work if paired with eye-tracking and something like the Meta Neural Band. The main issue is our hands are shaky, get tired quick and we need tactile feedback when doing fine-motor skill work (surgery, etc.)
Isn't that exactly the point parent try to make though? Yes, if you can rest your hand on something, or actual grab/hold things, then it'd be different. It's the lack of physical feedback/support that makes "with hands in open air is just not human-compatible" true.
Meanwhile, "cyberpunk" has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre. That's like someone trademarking "space opera", "romantasy", "film noir" etc.
I'm pretty sure the words "Apple", "Target", "Gap", "Camel", "Jaguar", "Shell" and many others are also trademarked. Some of them the world over. It doesn't stop you from using the word except in the same genre of business
Those don't apply to instances of themselves. It's like if you breed a new apple cultivar, name it "Apple", and then register a trademark, to be the only one to name their apple variety "Apple". Or you register the trademark "Science Fiction" for your new science fiction franchise.
Amusingly, what military types today usually wear is a Casio G-Shock. It's hard to break. It's unbothered by water, mud, etc. It doesn't transmit anything, which most "smart watches" do. (Wearing anything that transmits in a modern combat zone is waving a sign that says "kill me now") Solar power keeps it going without attention. There's a minimal light if you push a button. Right tool for the job. Not a status symbol.
I think Garmin Instinct is the ultimate "tactical" watch: rugged, solar-powered, e-ink screen providing 4 weeks of battery, smartphone connectivity, notifications, lets you track your pulse, sleep, movement. has compass, GPS, alarm, timer, and even maps
Choose Your Own Adventure is also trademarked, though that trademark (initially held by Bantam books, lapsed, and re-registered by another company) did originate the name of the genre
Even with SG1, SG1 definitely also had plenty of space and space ships, can't remember from which season exactly but lots of episodes have the team spent stuck on ships in space.
The colour purple is trademarked, for chocolate. That just means you can't use Cadbury purple as the color for your chocolate wrappers. You can still use it for anything else. You can't make a game called Cyberpunk but you can use it for anything else.
Huh, I’m surprised R. Talsorian Games doesn’t also have a trademark. Wonder if they sold it to CDPR under the condition that they’re still allowed to use it for their products. Also, apparently a company in Shenzen holds the trademark in relation to lighting products, so you probably won’t see any 2077 branded lamps any time soon
I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then.
Really? The CYBERSPACE trademark application wasn't rejected. It was abandoned in 1991 after the VR project was cancelled and we developers left Autodesk to start Sense8. The recorded disposition was "abandoned—failure to respond or late response."
And yeah, Autodesk was hardly a tiny startup. Its market cap at the end of 1989 was about $945 million.
But the "street" line was a deliberately smartass quotation from Gibson in a letter I wrote, not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture. Gibson subsequently had the better rejoinder: "Autodesk is not the street."
Judging the Autodesk Research Lab of 1989 by the reputation of the company Autodesk later became seems rather ahistorical. Even founder John Walker had already declared himself "Bored (sic) of Directors" by 1988:
The street is like nameless individuals. A corpo by contrast is the giant vertical sky-scrapers next to it. Total exact opposites. I don't see it as a clever joke when attached to a hostile trade-mark message. By using it in the opposite way from its actual meaning you embodied the entire antagonist cyberpunk corpo ethos in real life.
Plus, Autodesk trademarking the term is partly to prevent others finding use for it ("Cyberspace (TM) refers to a software product of Autodesk, Inc. Were any other software vendor to employ the term for one of their products, Autodesk would justifiable be upset.")
Fair enough, but Adobe was an upstart at some point in its life .. I remember the days when the Photoshop set were considered rebellious monkeys who didn't play well with the rest of the print industry .. until they came along and ate the print industry's lunch.
I'd go one step further on Gibsons' statement that the street find its own uses for things, and state that everything starts on the street before it becomes corporate, and then it returns to the street, eventually ...
Autodesk tried to trademark a phrase recently invented by an author. They would have had to defend it too. Would they have sued Gibson? Ahistorical my ass
Honestly I don't understand how it was accepted? Obviously Gibson invented it?
It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.
It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years.
As a kid that’s a hilarious name because “trump” is also a euphemism for fart. To this day, fart is the first thing I think of when I hear the word trump.
The amount of people in my life who use Meta for the company and not still Facebook is probably exactly zero. I'm not talking about articles or meta-(haha) discussion about Meta or HN, though.
On the subject of corrupt-vs-build, Tolkien's contemporary CS Lewis had some good bits in The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil is advising a junior on the corruption of his charge. (I don't think one needs to be Christian to pick out its insightful bits on the human condition.)
> Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh? But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy—and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own. A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do better.
> Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
How many people have you thanked for the words and phrases they originated? Note: They didn't make them famous. That happens through various means (marketing, PR, luck, etc...)
At least as many as the number of times I've tried to claim someone else's words and phrases as my exclusive intellectual property in order to profit, because I believe the latter is zero.
Trademarking words is common. "Apple" is one. It doesn't mean you can't use the word apple, it only means you can't name a computer company "Apple". There is still Apple Corps, Apple Bank, and tons of bakeries, cafes, donut shops, restaurants etc named things like "Apple Cafe", "Apple Donuts", "Apple Tree Diner", etc..
Or one can be like Apple, and just sort of ignore trademarks till you own them. Apple is kind of famous for taking over a significant portion of the music industry, despite a pre-existing agreement with Apple Corp never to do so. Not to mention launching the iPhone while Cisco still held the 'iPhone' trademark.
I had hoped the letter might be both conciliatory and provocative. For those troubled by the coexistence of apparent opposites, I recommend Hegel's sublation (Aufhebung), Crowley's crossing of the Abyss, and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in that order.
Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes.
https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...
Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7).
Funny that you mention this. I wrote something recently related to Leary’s work recently: https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/meat-ai-universe-test-harne...
Those are some groovie ideas! ;)
Your question about who decides what gets loaded into the context window is close to something I've been experimenting with. I worked on the original Sims, and I'm now developing MOOLLM, which is roughly The Sims crossed with LambdaMOO, running on an LLM.
The connection to Leary is quite literal. MOOLLM has a Mind Mirror skill, an extension of the Anthropic Skills approach to character and location simulation, meets the Self prototype based object system. It draws on Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror, the game published by Electronic Arts, alongside Sims-style personality traits and needs.
Leary's earlier work on the Interpersonal Circumplex and personality inventories supplies another connection to your question about control. There's the story of him recognizing his own psychological testing framework during prison intake and answering strategically to obtain a minimum-security classification, from which he subsequently escaped the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. Understanding how the system represented him helped him change what the system allowed him to do. Practical applications include prison escapes, and computer games too. ;)
MOOLLM's Mind Mirror skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/mind-mi...
Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror game from Electronic Arts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary%27s_Mind_Mirror
Leary explaining his MIND MIRROR computer program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oabRxvjf9k
Mind Mirror gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epOL4QiPLJo
I'm using these ideas as an editable vocabulary for exploring personalities, relationships, and different interpretations of a situation, not as a scientific model of consciousness or a way to diagnose people.
What interested me about The Sims wasn't just watching simulated people. It was being able to build their environment, change it while they were living in it, and discover how their behavior changed. LambdaMOO brought a related idea into a shared, programmable world: the inhabitants could also be its builders.
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm
In MOOLLM, directories represent rooms, files hold objects and character state, and the LLM interprets descriptions and behavioral instructions. The world persists outside the context window, but any particular interaction brings only part of it into context. Deciding what to retrieve, summarize, remember, or leave out becomes part of constructing the character's perspective.
I want that construction to be inspectable and editable. You should be able to look at the character description, memories, and instructions that were supplied, change them, and try the situation again. That doesn't reveal the model's internal workings, but it does let you examine and manipulate some of the conditions shaping its response.
So your "God's admin panel" made me smile. I'm interested in building one for these little worlds, and letting people move between playing a character, designing the environment, and examining the simulation -- even importing and exporting characters between games, and "llmulating" them in LLM driven microworld simulations like moollm. You don't have to believe our universe is simulated to learn something by building one you can take apart.
The moollm soul-city skill, inspired by something Will Wright said in 1996 about data portability:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/soul-ci...
I'd be interested in how you'd turn the context-window idea into an interaction: what would you want someone to be able to inspect or change?
This is fascinating. I’m intrigued by the combination of discursive metaphor and weak convention to define actor identities.
The writing style is not natural to me. I was initially put off by phrases like “YAML Jazz” even though I love Tron’s “digital jazz”. Maybe this is because I’ve never experienced psychedelics. I’m at least two generations beyond / behind - removed? - from the movement that defined this way of thinking and communicating.
But sitting with it, it makes sense. I have to stretch my brain. It feels like thinking through a new algorithm… except I’m juggling jello instead of assembling a puzzle.
Ultimately it aligns with my understanding of AI as xkcd’s stirred pile of linear algebra. LLMs don’t understand anything. They project words into probability space, infer momentum vectors based on chunks that bubbling up in the soup of digested everything, and strike out in the prognosticated direction with blind confidence constrained only by temperature.
We constrain these systems with sandboxes and sturdy deterministic tools. Prompts default to the same shape: sharp, precise, hard, directive. But maybe a bag of words is also valid.
If the computer knows your references, each token is much richer than I might assume. Does “minsky” vendor the psychedelic moment? Does “SIMS” scaffold a game loop worth of the emotional energy people have poured into that series? Do these combine to elevate Claude, Qwen, or any other multi-million-dollar number box into an engaging partner?
I will play around it with it to find out.
God, I only wish
It seems that to you, Rick Polito's "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again" (i.e. the summary for "The Wizard of Oz") would not have actual grounds. There are obvious factual relations between computing engines and that topic.
there's LSD, and there's LSD, but you heard that and know that. And I don't mean quality Hoffman "LSD 25" vs city part of town cook & shitty storage but purposefully bad formulas.
Or when some kids are invited to parties and everybody else dropped twice the amount when the door opens and then everyone thinks it's a joke the new kids can't interface with the absolute garbage of bags of words that miss any point whatsoever. ...
wait a minute, holy shit! The PC IS LSD.
But it's a 9/10 thing all the way up and down. "There's a bigger fish, better quality, better design" but the few percent pumping out creative, productive and ludicrously progressive stuff are in none of these funnbunny-nice-to-see-you-again groups ...
bad roll, bad luck, what a waste of time these cultures, authors and books were, holy shit
Hi, Eric!
Thanks for writing this up! "Autodesk is not the street" is a wonderful reply. I appreciate having your account and the actual letters to separate what happened from the story that grew around it.
I also remember you developing something called Warp (not IBM's ill-fated operating system), if I have the name right -- an early predecessor to QuickTime VR. Am I remembering that correctly?
Your description of the EyePhone, Polhemus tracker, and data glove brought back memories of VPL and Body Electric, which I later worked on as Bounce. There’s a rich history of Forth running through VR, graphics, and live performance that I’d love to compare notes about.
I knew Michael Perry through Laxen and Perry Forth (and Strawberry Music Festival), which Mitch Bradley built on in developing Forthmacs and Sun Forth, leading to Open Firmware. There’s Young Harvill’s Swivel 3D, written in Forth, in the VPL world too.
And the late Marc de Groot developed Meme, the Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment: a multi-user networked virtual-world system programmed in multitasking Forth. His June 1994 announcement emphasized portable executable behavior for objects, not just geometry, with code that could travel efficiently over the network. I dug up his website and announcement and posted them here (including some Tales of the Great TCL Wars):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22342800
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125100147/http://www.immers...
And here is his patent on Meme, which has 53 citations, including Philip Rosedal's Distributed Simulation patent (who made Second Life and High Fidelity):
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6421047B1/en
Another wonderful part of this history is Coco and Peter Conn’s HOMER & Associates. They hired Forth, Inc. to program their Homer II visual mixing console, and got Chuck Moore himself to write the host software!
Paul Rother worked alongside Chuck, learning Forth and programming the individual visual channels. The console had 24 channels with their own Z80s, a master Z80 running multitasking PolyForth in 32K, touch-sensitive sliders, and a “joystick bumper” like a Mustang gearshift. You could perform visual sequences, record them, and overdub corrections like an audio mix, then take the recording and slide trays to the optical printer.
Paul later got a CAT-700 framebuffer running as a Forth paint system alongside the optical-printer controls. Coco remembers its early use on Abracadabra and Atomic Dog.
I posted Coco’s and Paul’s accounts to Hacker News with Coco’s permission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
I’ve also collected the story, sources, and photographs here. Paul’s account describes working with Chuck directly:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
There are linked collections for Coco, Peter, Paul, and Chuck:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
I’ve been bringing Forth and hand-controlled graphics together again on a somewhat unlikely machine: a PDP-7 running in the browser.
Mitch Bradley and Claude recently wrote a beautiful PDP-7 Forth in one day. Its inner interpreter takes three instructions, using XCT to execute thread cells whose opcodes select the behavior. I integrated it into my Cabinet PDP-7 emulator, with a Type 340 vector display, Mitch's 3D turtle written in Forth, and an emulated fictional hand-tracking peripheral, as if the Data Glove + Polhemus existed in 1967, that plugs into the PDP-7 cabinet with its own IOT instructions wrapped with a Forth API.
The browser tracks your hand with the webcam and exposes the coordinates through PDP-7 device registers. Forth running inside the emulated machine reads those registers and draws the hand. The camera processing stays in the browser; only tracking numbers enter the emulated machine, converted to 18 bit integers in the scale compatible with the Forth lookup table trig words and turtle graphics coordinate system. The hand tracking library uses floating point, so the idea is to have the virtual hardware interface do all the pre-processing so it's convenient to program in Forth.
Here’s ULTIMATE HAND, implemented in PDP-7 assembly and Forth:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/ultimate-hand/
It’s Minsky and Shannon's Ultimate (aka Useless) Machine, except your hand becomes its hand. Allow the camera, hold up your hand with your palm away and fingers up, and the box opens and carries your hand toward the switch. Touch the switch with a fingertip and it retreats into the box. The arm positions the hand, but you control its finger shapes.
Ultimate (aka Useless) Machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
Ultimate Hand Forth code with turtle graphics:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Forth datahand device driver:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
TypeScript datahand PDP-7 device adaptor emulator:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
TypeScript hand tracking device emulator (MediaPipe wrapper):
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Simple Forth data hand tester (point the light pen at the fingers to see their names -- the tooltips are in the 340 display user interface overlay, not drawn by the PDP-7):
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/hand/
The Ultimate Machine itself is an emulated fictional PDP-7 device with its own IOT instructions to inspect and control it, whose only purpose is to turn itself off (through a state machine with configurable delays), which exposes its state to the PDP-7 so it can render an animated view with vector turtle graphics with Forth:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
And it wouldn't be classically Turing Complete without a Turing Machine co-processor device -- a lot like the 340 display -- with its own IOTs and instruction set via DMA, that represents code and tape in PDP-7 memory. When it runs off the end of the tape window, it tapefaults: (temporarily) halting and sending an interrupt to the PDP-7, so it can implement virtual infinite tape memory, potentially using compression, extended memory, or other devices like disk or paper tape:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/turing/
Turing Machine fictional co-processor device emulator:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Mitch’s Forth:
https://github.com/MitchBradley/pdp7forth
The hand device and Forth graphics documentation:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Here's a demo of other stuff the PDP-7 emulator can do, including displaying the source code and scans of the line printer listing from 1971 of the original code it's executing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
Did you encounter Marc or Meme? I’d love to hear what other Forth connections you remember from the Autodesk and Sense8 days.
That was an inspiration for my NeWS PostScript visual programming and debugging environment, the PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer, and the paper I wrote about it in 1989 quotes Gibson:
Abstract: The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.
PostScript Source Code Available Here: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/
Introduction: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ....
[Gibson, Neuromancer]
Too bad the PC was more like PCP, the only drug that everything the government tell your about it is true. And Elon Musk's favorite excuse for pissing his pants all the time.
Cyberspace is defined with the word "hallucination", and Gibson spent 1977-1983 writing his short fiction and first novel on the subject. The degree to which he was influenced by psychedelic culture is open to debate, but I agree that it was non-zero. I think Grateful Dead tapes is your own projection, however. Bob Marley is more likely as muse-ic.
Yup, there’s righteous dub involved in orbital adventures
DUB opened the portal to outer dimensions for people too afraid of LSD. They emerge pretty much at the same time, and also DUB is quite psychedelic on its own.
It is a long strange read, but 'the electric koolaid acid test' has passages in it relating conversations about our computerised present AND the development of AI, all the way back to 1963 and very much on the bus, the Dead were playing live in the house and at the tests, and no doubt on the roof of the bus. Keasy as the non leader, it's all there written down in dayglo and ultraviolet, tapes, film, photos, and the movie. Marley's sceen was adjacent, they got there amp tech from the same crews building for the Dead, but rock steady is all there own.
I saw that Autodesk VR setup. They had ping-pong working. There was serious thought about how to do CAD work in VR. But it was like trying to do mechanical drawing while wearing oven mitts. Precision work with hands in open air is just not human-compatible. But a lot of people at the time did think it was the future.
Hey, thanks for reminding me about that. We were inspired by Atari's Pong, to which I had devoted many quarters at the bar during my undergrad days.
Nolan Bushnell came to visit Autodesk at our invitation, and we gave him a demo of our 3D version of Pong. Later, Nolan gave me some of my first business lessons at a meeting held at the Thai Garden restaurant at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino. Memories...
I agree that VR isn't the best modality for precision CAD work, although it can be great for visualization. These days I just dictate what I want using a local Whisper instance, have Hemes-webui get my local LLM to write Python code, and then let FreeCAD generate the geometry. For me, that works much better than drawing in midair.
Precision work with hands can work if paired with eye-tracking and something like the Meta Neural Band. The main issue is our hands are shaky, get tired quick and we need tactile feedback when doing fine-motor skill work (surgery, etc.)
Isn't that exactly the point parent try to make though? Yes, if you can rest your hand on something, or actual grab/hold things, then it'd be different. It's the lack of physical feedback/support that makes "with hands in open air is just not human-compatible" true.
I'm still convinced it is!
Was the "cyberspace" trademark overturned because of Gibson's protest? In my opinion he'd have a strong case in court against Adobe.
Meanwhile, "cyberpunk" has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre. That's like someone trademarking "space opera", "romantasy", "film noir" etc.
I'm pretty sure the words "Apple", "Target", "Gap", "Camel", "Jaguar", "Shell" and many others are also trademarked. Some of them the world over. It doesn't stop you from using the word except in the same genre of business
Those don't apply to instances of themselves. It's like if you breed a new apple cultivar, name it "Apple", and then register a trademark, to be the only one to name their apple variety "Apple". Or you register the trademark "Science Fiction" for your new science fiction franchise.
See also the legal drama over someone trademarking "NATO strap" for watches:
* https://mgbwatches.com/blogs/journal/why-we-re-phasing-out-t...
* https://timeandtidewatches.com/trademark-wrangle-over-nato-s...
* https://www.crownandbuckle.com/nato-strap-history
* https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/nato-history/history-by-the...
Amusingly, what military types today usually wear is a Casio G-Shock. It's hard to break. It's unbothered by water, mud, etc. It doesn't transmit anything, which most "smart watches" do. (Wearing anything that transmits in a modern combat zone is waving a sign that says "kill me now") Solar power keeps it going without attention. There's a minimal light if you push a button. Right tool for the job. Not a status symbol.
Around here large amount of military personnel is wearing Garmin. I see a lot with Fenix 7X, Instinct 2X, and Enduro 3.
But hey if they ever qualify as "smart watch" they're definitely more on the utilitarian side than on the "wrist-sized phone" one.
I think Garmin Instinct is the ultimate "tactical" watch: rugged, solar-powered, e-ink screen providing 4 weeks of battery, smartphone connectivity, notifications, lets you track your pulse, sleep, movement. has compass, GPS, alarm, timer, and even maps
Time moves on.
This makes me wonder if omegaverse (if you don’t know, don’t know) is trademarked given its litigious history.
> ... if you don't know, don't know...
See, this made me know. I'm gonna go shower. :(
Choose Your Own Adventure is also trademarked, though that trademark (initially held by Bantam books, lapsed, and re-registered by another company) did originate the name of the genre
Riddle me this, was Stargate SG-1 and family a space opera.
I inclined to believe so. I miss shows like that, we need more space operas
The Stargate franchise is absolutely space opera.
Without space ships? Without space?
The "Stargate" franchise absolutely had both space and space ships.
The parent dropped the "sg1" and is talk about the entire franchise, not just 1 show or movie in it.
Even with SG1, SG1 definitely also had plenty of space and space ships, can't remember from which season exactly but lots of episodes have the team spent stuck on ships in space.
The colour purple is trademarked, for chocolate. That just means you can't use Cadbury purple as the color for your chocolate wrappers. You can still use it for anything else. You can't make a game called Cyberpunk but you can use it for anything else.
Totally different. Purple has nothing to do with chocolate, but Cyberpunk 2077 is a cyberpunk game. It's named after the category it is part of.
I wonder if the trademark could actually be enforced.
Who owns the trademark on that?
Looks like CD Projekt (for Cyberpunk 2077 I expect).
Huh, I’m surprised R. Talsorian Games doesn’t also have a trademark. Wonder if they sold it to CDPR under the condition that they’re still allowed to use it for their products. Also, apparently a company in Shenzen holds the trademark in relation to lighting products, so you probably won’t see any 2077 branded lamps any time soon
Lame. It should belong to R. Talsorian Games still.
It should belong to no one because it was already an established sci fi category before then. That's why it was invalidated in Europe.
I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then.
This was almost 30 years ago, in 1989.
Autodesk was quite alright back then.
Really? The CYBERSPACE trademark application wasn't rejected. It was abandoned in 1991 after the VR project was cancelled and we developers left Autodesk to start Sense8. The recorded disposition was "abandoned—failure to respond or late response."
https://uspto.report/TM/73816876
And yeah, Autodesk was hardly a tiny startup. Its market cap at the end of 1989 was about $945 million.
But the "street" line was a deliberately smartass quotation from Gibson in a letter I wrote, not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture. Gibson subsequently had the better rejoinder: "Autodesk is not the street."
Judging the Autodesk Research Lab of 1989 by the reputation of the company Autodesk later became seems rather ahistorical. Even founder John Walker had already declared himself "Bored (sic) of Directors" by 1988:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_65.html
The street is like nameless individuals. A corpo by contrast is the giant vertical sky-scrapers next to it. Total exact opposites. I don't see it as a clever joke when attached to a hostile trade-mark message. By using it in the opposite way from its actual meaning you embodied the entire antagonist cyberpunk corpo ethos in real life.
Plus, Autodesk trademarking the term is partly to prevent others finding use for it ("Cyberspace (TM) refers to a software product of Autodesk, Inc. Were any other software vendor to employ the term for one of their products, Autodesk would justifiable be upset.")
Fair enough, but Adobe was an upstart at some point in its life .. I remember the days when the Photoshop set were considered rebellious monkeys who didn't play well with the rest of the print industry .. until they came along and ate the print industry's lunch.
I'd go one step further on Gibsons' statement that the street find its own uses for things, and state that everything starts on the street before it becomes corporate, and then it returns to the street, eventually ...
> not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture
Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead...
Such a tone deaf response.
Autodesk tried to trademark a phrase recently invented by an author. They would have had to defend it too. Would they have sued Gibson? Ahistorical my ass
Honestly I don't understand how it was accepted? Obviously Gibson invented it?
It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.
It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years.
It's a shame we've lost "meta" and "grok".
"A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our words and break all bonds of vocabulary, but it is not this day!"
Don't surrender it, make 'em work for their ill-gotten gains.
I will not stop using good words like those. (We really do need a direct replacement for "trump" in card games, though.)
No, we need a replacement for trump outside card games
Top Trumps is a popular card game for kids here.
As a kid that’s a hilarious name because “trump” is also a euphemism for fart. To this day, fart is the first thing I think of when I hear the word trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps
Interestingly, in Germany the game is called Top Ass, with that being the German word for Ace, of course.
The amount of people in my life who use Meta for the company and not still Facebook is probably exactly zero. I'm not talking about articles or meta-(haha) discussion about Meta or HN, though.
We've done nothing of the sort.
Dont forget Lord of the Rings too.
Palantir (of Orthanc).
Anduril
Narya Capital
"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."
On the subject of corrupt-vs-build, Tolkien's contemporary CS Lewis had some good bits in The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil is advising a junior on the corruption of his charge. (I don't think one needs to be Christian to pick out its insightful bits on the human condition.)
> Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh? But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy—and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own. A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do better.
> Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
The observation that hating others' enemies is not technically incompatible with loving one's own is brilliant.
conflating metaverse and meta
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/metaverse/
uh exactly? I'm saying the same thing as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50148049
metaverse is the term coined by Neal Stephenson. Not 'meta'
How many people have you thanked for the words and phrases they originated? Note: They didn't make them famous. That happens through various means (marketing, PR, luck, etc...)
Why do think they deserve to be thanked?
At least as many as the number of times I've tried to claim someone else's words and phrases as my exclusive intellectual property in order to profit, because I believe the latter is zero.
Trademarking words is common. "Apple" is one. It doesn't mean you can't use the word apple, it only means you can't name a computer company "Apple". There is still Apple Corps, Apple Bank, and tons of bakeries, cafes, donut shops, restaurants etc named things like "Apple Cafe", "Apple Donuts", "Apple Tree Diner", etc..
Apple sues business over pear logo
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53740820
Not entirely true. Apple is very much trying to litigate even the smallest businesses showing some kind of apple, even cafės etc.
Or one can be like Apple, and just sort of ignore trademarks till you own them. Apple is kind of famous for taking over a significant portion of the music industry, despite a pre-existing agreement with Apple Corp never to do so. Not to mention launching the iPhone while Cisco still held the 'iPhone' trademark.
>Why do think they deserve to be thanked?
This is the way cults are formed, and from cults, culture.
There's nothing wrong with acknowledging people for their great contributions - unless you're rabidly anti-cult, in which case, nihilism.
it's humorous that he thinks that letter was "conciliatory".
I had hoped the letter might be both conciliatory and provocative. For those troubled by the coexistence of apparent opposites, I recommend Hegel's sublation (Aufhebung), Crowley's crossing of the Abyss, and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in that order.