Hi--
I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
seems that nothing since has matched it.
However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
Any suggestions are very welcome.
--
Tiarn�n
········@yahoo.com (Tiarn�n � Corr�in) writes:
> I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
> about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
> seems that nothing since has matched it.
>
> However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
> materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
> about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
> workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
Check the "About this Book" section (page ix) of Keene's book
"Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp". Also, some time ago
Rainer Joswig posted some screen shots of Concordia. See his site:
http://lispm.dyndns.org/
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://lisp.tech.coop/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools (see also http://clrfi.alu.org):
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
> ········@yahoo.com (Tiarn�n � Corr�in) writes:
>
> > I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
> > about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
> > seems that nothing since has matched it.
> >
> > However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
> > materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
> > about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
> > workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
>
> Check the "About this Book" section (page ix) of Keene's book
> "Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp". Also, some time ago
> Rainer Joswig posted some screen shots of Concordia. See his site:
>
> http://lispm.dyndns.org/
Without looking, I bet that those are in fact screen shots of
the Document Browser, which was one application of Concordia.
It was the hypertext viewer used for reading the online documentation.
Concordia (the authoring environment) was a seperate layered product.
In article <·············@news.dtpq.com>,
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:
> Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
>
> > ········@yahoo.com (Tiarn�n � Corr�in) writes:
> >
> > > I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
> > > about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
> > > seems that nothing since has matched it.
> > >
> > > However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
> > > materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
> > > about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
> > > workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
> >
> > Check the "About this Book" section (page ix) of Keene's book
> > "Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp". Also, some time ago
> > Rainer Joswig posted some screen shots of Concordia. See his site:
> >
> > http://lispm.dyndns.org/
>
> Without looking, I bet that those are in fact screen shots of
> the Document Browser, which was one application of Concordia.
I think I haven't published screenshots of Concordia, but
it maybe seen in one of the Lispm videos. For example
in one you can seen the graphics editor, which is part
of Concordia.
Ralf M�ller has some screenshots (the monitor shown is mine):
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/concordia/concordia.html
> It was the hypertext viewer used for reading the online documentation.
> Concordia (the authoring environment) was a seperate layered product.
Oh, that's no problem. I have Concordia installed on my MacIvory.
Rainer Joswig <······@lisp.de> writes:
> I think I haven't published screenshots of Concordia, but
A while back, you posted to comp.lang.lisp links to 2 Concordia screen
shots, which I printed and still keep.
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://lisp.tech.coop/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools:
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface
In article <··············@plato.moon.paoloamoroso.it>,
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> wrote:
> Rainer Joswig <······@lisp.de> writes:
>
> > I think I haven't published screenshots of Concordia, but
>
> A while back, you posted to comp.lang.lisp links to 2 Concordia screen
> shots, which I printed and still keep.
Right, I know that I have them here on my disk. But I don't
think they are now on my web site. I guess the video gives
a much better impression - especially since
it has so many screenshots. ;-)
In article <··············@Cascade.local>,
········@yahoo.com (Tiarn�n � Corr�in) wrote:
> Hi--
>
> I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
> about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
> seems that nothing since has matched it.
>
> However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
> materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
> about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
> workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
>
> Any suggestions are very welcome.
see this quicktime mpeg4 movie http://lispm.dyndns.org/mov/concordia.mov
it starts with an introduction of the Document Examiner and
then shows how to create documentation records with markup
and links using Concordia. the demo is running for about 20 minutes.
It is VERY large (147MB) and will take a LONG
time to download, since my upload bandwidth is small.
If several people will download it, it will take even longer...
It shows the Document Examiner and Concordia. The applications
were running on a MacIvory 3 and the screen was the X11
application on a PowerMac. I have then recorded the
user interaction on the PowerMac. There is also some sound comment.
On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:34:31 +0200, Rainer Joswig wrote:
> It is VERY large (147MB) and will take a LONG time to download, since my
> upload bandwidth is small. If several people will download it, it will
> take even longer...
BitTorrent.
Rainer Joswig <······@lisp.de> writes:
> see this quicktime mpeg4 movie http://lispm.dyndns.org/mov/concordia.mov
>
> it starts with an introduction of the Document Examiner and
> then shows how to create documentation records with markup
> and links using Concordia. the demo is running for about 20 minutes.
>
> It is VERY large (147MB) and will take a LONG
> time to download, since my upload bandwidth is small.
> If several people will download it, it will take even longer...
I have created a torrent of this movie. It is available here:
http://www.xach.com/bt/concordia.mov.torrent
If several people will download it, it will take even less time...
Zach
> I have created a torrent of this movie. It is available here:
> http://www.xach.com/bt/concordia.mov.torrent
From two different points on the net, I get a connect timeout to
www.xach.com.
joelh
Joel Ray Holveck <·····@juniper.net> writes:
> > I have created a torrent of this movie. It is available here:
> > http://www.xach.com/bt/concordia.mov.torrent
>
> From two different points on the net, I get a connect timeout to
> www.xach.com.
Should work now. I had some scheduled maintenance today.
Zach
Thank you very much. It is quite interresting.
What does a concordia file look like ? Is it some kind of lisp markup
language ?
Can you give an idea of the complexity of concordia ? How many lines of
code does it represent ?
Thibault
"Thibault Langlois" <·················@di.fc.ul.pt> writes:
> Can you give an idea of the complexity of concordia ?
> How many lines of code does it represent ?
I don't really know anything about Concordia.
I did not help develop it, and it wasn't normally used
by developers -- just by the documentation staff).
It may be useful to distinguish between Sage, Concordia, and Document
Examiner. (I am not sure I understand the relationship between those
pieces, myself.) There were also image/graphic/bitmap editors that
were used as subsystems (and of course there was an adjunct hardcopy
system, Postscript, etc.) The Emacs implementation (Zwei) also
played a role. Not counting any of that extra stuff,
I think Concordia is about 60 KLOC in 120 files (1.8 MB of Lisp).
> What does a concordia file look like ?
> Is it some kind of lisp markup language ?
Concordia used a what-you-see-is-SIMILAR-to-what-you-get
composition tool. There was also a markup language involved;
I don't know anything about it.
I think for one thing, based on my extremely hazy recollection,
is that documents can contain Lisp expressions, so that the document
content can be "active". (Sort of like VB macro viruses in Word.)
The binary file format for documents such as the system's online
hypertext documentation was called SAB (Sage Binary).
It's a stream of Lisp objects, a little like a FASL file.
Each object is marked with a character code indicating the type
of object, followed by one or more primitive elements that are
usually strings or symbols. Generally, READ is called on the
strings to parse the pieces of the object to reconstitute it.
For the Document Examiner, a few kinds of objects that you'd
find in a SAB file are: topics, types, unique-IDs, views,
fields, crossreferences, etc. The underlying primitive
elements of these are the usual kinds of Lisp objects
such as strings, integers, alists, etc.
Here's the reader subroutine for a "picture" object:
(def-sab-reader =sab-code-picture= (stream table)
(let ((type (read-sab-thing stream table ()))
(file-name (read-sab-thing stream table ()))
(name (read-sab-thing stream table =sab-code-string=))
(contents (read-sab-thing stream table ()))
binary-encoding drawing-function)
(etypecase contents
((array (unsigned-byte 8))
(setq binary-encoding contents))
((and symbol (not null))
(setq drawing-function contents)))
(make-sage-picture :type type
:file-name file-name
:name name
:binary-encoding binary-encoding
:drawing-function drawing-function)))
Some other random notes...
There were higher level objects called "records".
Concordia supported multi-authoring version control.
I think someone wrote a stand-alone document examiner for the
Macintosh OS. Various Lisp programs were written by people
(maybe all internal) to do things like output TeX and Scribe.
(Of course, that doesn't do much for interactive documents.)
Hope this helps (but I doubt it)!
Chris
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I think for one thing, based on my extremely hazy recollection,
> is that documents can contain Lisp expressions, so that the document
> content can be "active". (Sort of like VB macro viruses in Word.)
Good thing that stuff died, then. Now we only have to get rid the world
of Word...
mkb.
In article <························@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Thibault Langlois" <·················@di.fc.ul.pt> wrote:
> Thank you very much. It is quite interresting.
> What does a concordia file look like ? Is it some kind of lisp markup
> language ?
It is a binary format. Remember it builds a documentation 'database'.
This database is built incrementally by reading these files.
Each documentation record can exist in the running world
in several versions (versions of the documentation record,
the current version and the currently edited version).
There are also all kinds of other supporting datastructures.
> Can you give an idea of the complexity of concordia ? How many lines of
> code does it represent ?
Concordia is based on a few substrates that are the operating system.
The application might be around 100000 lines of code. This only
gives you a rough idea about the complexity, because 100klines
in Lisp in a Lisp Machine environment is quite different written
from what you might be used to. Usually there is quite a
lot of macrology and lots of classes and methods. Lots
of patching into ZWEI and Zmacs...
""Tiarn�n � Corr�in"" <········@yahoo.com> wrote in message
···················@Cascade.local...
> Hi--
>
> I have been intrigued by the scanty material I've seen on the web
> about Symbolics Concordia, the Genera document preparation system. It
> seems that nothing since has matched it.
>
> However, the material on the web consists largely of promotional
> materials. I'm interested in any additional information or resources
> about this product, particularly screenshots, illustrations of the
> workflow, and the underlying document storage database.
>
> Any suggestions are very welcome.
>
> --
> Tiarn�n
Scanty material? Yes, I've noticed that too.
Mysterious, is it not?
I had a private email exchange with a former TI Explorer
programmer not too long ago, for example.
He indicated that once TI decided to shut down the Lisp/AI
operation, the machines were quickly discarded.
Much of the operating system software, if not all of it
was given to one of the programmers and apparently
has vanished into obscurity.
Some of the Symbolics software was commercialized successfully.
To get an idea of the quality of the software from this era,
one need only download and try out "Maxima", the Symbolic
Math system derived from MIT's famous "Macsyma" effort.
Thanks to the persistence and efforts of Univ. of Texas' Dr.
Schelter (regretfully now deceased) and several dedicated
enthusiasts, and it is now available today on several platforms.
Interestingly, Maxima thrives today while its commercialized
cousin, "Macsyma" has fallen into desuetude.
If only people like Dr. Schelter had preserved some of the
Lisp machine era programs - one wonders what they could have done.
Curious.
Jim