Homepage: https://screwlisp.small-web.org

Something a little bit different.

Old Computing Challenge!

http://occ.deadnet.se/

Old computing challenges are an annual event where people do 'old computing', especially
permacomputing oriented computing for a week. While my main pc is a 13 year old laptop with no
internal drive or battery, which aren't made anymore, I would also like to journal something special
throught OCC25.

We are a few days in, but I figured out what I am doing for this occ: Using xemacs. I thought of this
when I came across Richard Gabriel referencing his discovery of [jwz](https://www.jwz.org/about.html), whom I
recognized from the Mastodon, and suddenly jwz's existence clicked in my brain.

Jwz made that clock for calculating how many more minutes you had to stay at your job before you
could burn everything down and live the rest of your life without compromise. Of course, jwz made it
to the end and no-longer needs to actively maintain that clock.

Jwz also was a developer, maybe /the/ developer of early Lucid Emacs, a modern emacs other than GNU
emacs. (And firefox, but can't win 'em all, right?). They were early in fish linux too.

I didn't actually meet jwz recently, they were just the impetus for this cascade of OCC thoughts.


xemacs

is currently developed! I didn't realise it. I thought it was basically slowly bitrotting but being
kept alive as a protest against gnu emacs. Still, I think discovering an antedeluvian technology is
still completely viable and actually has been and is being brought back is an OCC treasure.

Fortunately, it still works like I remember it working in years before its 2025 release, which seems
to have been a significant comeback year.

There isn't the elpa/melpa/nongnu package stuff in xemacs. Instead, you normally pick up a "sumo tarball
release", which is a curated universe of xemacs lisp programmed packages (= elisp) all tarred up together.
Each package is gzipped I think, for size.

I picked up ilisp, which provides an inferior-lisp mode.

M-x customize-variable <ret>

inferior-lisp-p<tab> -> inferior-lisp-program <ret>

type it to be "ecl" and mash save.

q

M-x inferior-lisp

squeeky clean.

The thing is, I have no idea how I should achieve something like emacsclient -e '`(some code)'
in gnu emacs, which I use constantly: there's no M-x start-server in xemacs (that I am aware of).

I will daily weblog these text files for the remainder of the challenge.

I'm at https://gamerplus.org/@screwlisp on the Mastodon these days.

PS: I might try picking up GCL (nee, Austin-Kyoto Common Lisp, an 80s DOS-ported common lisp)

which I understand purports to have become a conformant common lisp last year.

I would love to hear from everyone; I am not on IRC much, but I will try.

Oh, if you can figure out times from UTC:

I'm interviewing LambdaCalculus (hackers.town -ie) about HOPE and PhreakNIC tomorrow
0UTC Wednesday (8pm Tuesday in Boston I think?)
on
https://anonradio.net

i.e. https://anonradio.net:8443/anonradio (it's an mp3 stream).

Hope to see you there. I'll get on irc while the interview's live.

t.

https://screwlisp.small-web.org

https://gamerplus.org/@screwlisp/114856380675402949 <- toot thread