#kentshistoryproject

Many years ago, I wanted to learn Portuguese quickly, based on my existing knowledge of Spanish. I went to a professor at MIT that had taught a linguistics class I took (I wish I could remember who), and he give me a photocopy of an article "Portugués al Instante" ("Instant Portuguese") written by Leo Gilson Ribeiro. It seems to have been published in a magazine, but there was insufficient information on the photocopy to trace that, too. It was a poor photocopy, and had some smudges at places the copy had been creased, plus the right hand edge of the article was clipped off. So one had to use one's imagination. I spent considerable time in the last couple of weeks creating a readable restoration of this document. I had found invaluable in my own learning so many years ago because it allowed me to rapidly synthesize some scaffolding, to guess many words that might be present in Portuguese and to recognize them if I saw them. I was unable to find it anywhere on the modern web, and I've put it in the archival GitHub repository of documents I call "Kent's History Project", which are things I need to get rid of and didn't want to be lost to history. Separately, I've also hosted the document on my personal web site, since there may be special interest in this separate from the larger project: http://nhplace.com/kent/History/portuguese/portugues_al_instante.html The repository version includes a README.md that details some useful information about how the restoration was done. The document itself contains a place you can click in the upper right corner of the document to reveal metadata about the restoration details, as some of it was heuristically recovered, but the text will probably read better (especially for sight-impaired readers) without that additional text active.. https://github.com/netsettler/netsettlement/tree/main/portuguese #Spanish #Portuguese #Translation #KentsHistoryProject #history #linguistics #languages

As part of my ongoing history project, I am checking hardcopy documents I have against online archives to try to notice when things I'm forced by circumstance to get rid of are available from some other source. I noticed web pointers to something called the Lagout Museum [1], which was a web site that had a lot of old computer documents, but in particular some Symbolics lisp machine documents. It's gone now, so I was getting 404s. But I found it on the Internet Archive's amazing Wayback Machine [2]. Sadly, it's a pain to browse because the historical artifacts [3] contain code that pops up a prompt for donations. So, always up to a challenge, I used my netsettlement git(hub) repo to host a browsable mirror of the directory structure (not the actual files) that does not have the pop-up menu problem. It's better explained in the README.md at https://github.com/netsettler/netsettlement/blob/main/symbolics/lagout_museum/ for more details. [1[ Original home of the Lagout Museum (https://lagout.org) [2] Internet Archive (https://archive.org) [3] Internet Archive backup of The Lagout Museum (https://web.archive.org/web/20251010122927/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/) #KentsHistoryProject #Lisp #LispM #LispMachines #Zetalisp #Symbolics #RetroComputing #InternetArchive #WaybackMachine #LagoutMuseum

As part of my history project, I posted scans of source listings of the Knowledge-Based Editor (KBE) that I worked on while I was at MIT. https://github.com/netsettler/netsettlement/tree/main/kbe There is a README.md explaining about the project and the status of the files and their permitted use. In parallel, there's also an OCR'd version and a preliminary version of a headless port to SBCL done by Jeff Shrager. He was holding it until I got my sources up. Details on that coming soon. #KBE #KBEmacs #zmacs #KentsHistoryProject #KnowledgeBasedEditor #Lisp #SBCL #LispMachine #Maclisp #Zetalisp #RetroComputing #ComputerHistory

@vnikolov@ieji.de @pascal_costanza@functional.cafe @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @SDF@mastodon.sdf.org The history archive I'm building on github is willing to hold files that are not well-stored elsewhere but I don't want to weigh it down with things that are already safely stored. But safely stored is blurrier than I would have expected because sometimes they're stored in ways that are poorly indexed. The Internet Archive and MIT's DSpace are examples of things not well-indexed, but I suspect most archival storage is really not intelligible. I have had an LLM helping me navigate painful indexes, but it's slow-going sometimes. For example, I have some documents that it turned out were already in the Internet Archive, just badly positioned. Like there is a thing called the Lagout Museum that was on the web for a while and held a lot of interesting Symbolics documents. They are still there in the Internet Archive, but you don't look under Symbolics, you have to find them under this museum. It's not an easy thing. I only ran into it because there was a live-web pointer to a 404 of the Lagout Museum live on the web, and I traced into whether the IA had a archival copy, which it did. But if you go to https://web.archive.org/web/20251010122927/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/ you can see a lot of Symbolics documents that are hard to find elsewhere. People should bookmark this and link it from more prominent sites. Each page, incidentally, asks you to donate, but the museum site is gone. I guess not enough people donated. There is a sad irony in the donate button popping up in the archive. But, relevant to this thread, this file has information and a very small code sample for defwhopper. It also mentions defwhopper-subst, which it says is really just syntactic sugar for a defwrapper. The relevant file is software/genera_8/Symbolics_Common_Lisp_Programming_Constructs.pdf which you can find in the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20191013221848/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/software/genera_8/Symbolics_Common_Lisp_Programming_Constructs.pdf Last time this Lagout Museumcame up for discussion, I think @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org had asked @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org to get them better placement, but I don't know if they did. The relevant task, in my opinion, is just to make a symbolic link, or whatever the Internet Archive equivalent of same is, so that there's a Symbolics documentation area that's more easily findable and just points to https://web.archive.org/web/20251010122927/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/ which is much harder to find. In general, it would be nice if someone had a curated map of old manuals that was by device type, including links so that if some devices shared documentation, you could find the doc under any applicable. It's probably work to do that, but maybe if it was set up right, volunteers would help organize, as happens at Wikipedia either by having a set of trusted curators (perhaps partitioned by area of expertise) or some way for the public to vote on suggested changes. But right now it's just an unintelligible sea of undifferentiated duplicates in some of the areas, and I find that a real impediment to knowing whether documents I possess are already properly archived. #KentsHistoryProject #InternetArchive #Symbolics #SymbolicsDocumentation #Documentation #RetroComputing