Has anybody here worked with the Connection Machine or the Lisp Machine?
srveit: I didn't work with these, but did work on the Symbolics 3600 circa 1985. It introduced me to a lot of new technology. I learned Lisp, of course, on it. I learned Zmacs and the "Meta" key. Emacs is still my favorite editor/IDE. We had a Canon laser printer ($12K, 360 DPI, liquid toner) that I used to print a proof of my wedding program (using proportional Times Roman font). I hooked it up via Ethernet (using 10BASE5 vampire taps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap) to a DEC 11/785. I first learned TCP/IP programming using it. All of the OS source code was available to view and patch if needed. It was the first windowing GUI I ever used. It was easy to program (in Lisp) and was the most advanced software development environment of the time. We developed a research AI system (called Pilot's Associate) that interfaced with a real-time flight simulation. It was great fun.