[HN Gopher] Meme (Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment)...
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Meme (Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment): Multiuser
Forth VR (1994)
Author : DonHopkins
Score : 39 points
Date : 2020-02-16 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Immersive Systems Inc:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990125100147/http://www.immers...
|
| [I'll quote some of the page here for people with sensitive eyes]
|
| >Meme tm: Real VR for the Net!
|
| >"A brilliant idea..." -Andries van Dam
|
| >Meme tm was designed from the ground up for multi-user networked
| virtual worlds.
|
| >Meme tm is a platform-independent standard for networked virtual
| reality.
|
| >High performance. Self-contained. FAST real-time 3D. Easily
| customized for use with head-mounted displays, data gloves, and
| other VR peripherals.
|
| >Meme tm is designed so it can run on memory-limited machines
| such as settop boxes and game consoles. Meme tm can also take
| full advantage of the most advanced graphics hardware.
|
| >"This is what VRML 3.0 hopes to be." -Tony Parisi, VRML co-
| inventor
|
| >Meme tm enables the construction of virtual worlds on the
| Internet.
|
| >Fully interactive. Inhabitable by many users. Quickly
| constructed. Complex lifelike behavior. Easy to deploy.
|
| >"Marc de Groot is a brilliant programmer." -Mark Pesce, VRML co-
| inventor
|
| >Highly efficient virtual machine used by NASA and the aerospace
| industry. Will run on any system that has a 3D rendering engine.
| Portable to platforms with primitive or non-existent operating
| systems. Really works identically on all platforms. Runs in less
| than 500 kilobytes of memory. Upwards of a million context
| switches per second on current-generation processors.
|
| >"How the hell did you do that?" -unknown attendee, Web
| Interactive '96
|
| [Click through for more praise for Meme, colorful images, and
| awesome 1994 web site design!]
|
| An Overview of Meme:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990504200616/http://www.immers...
|
| >Meme TM--The Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment Meme
| TM is a software package for the development of virtual world
| applications.
|
| >Worlds built with Meme TM can be inhabited by multiple users who
| are connected to a computer network. Meme TM virtual worlds
| distinguish themselves by providing rich object behavior, unlike
| menu-driven systems that offer a fixed set of choices.
|
| >Meme TM is designed to be interoperable, that is, Meme TM worlds
| and objects will behave identically on any computer running Meme
| TM, irrespective of differences in the underlying hardware.
|
| >Meme TM was conceived to enable the construction of a shared
| virtual universe for everyone on the Internet.
|
| >what kind of software package is Meme TM?
|
| >Meme TM does not easily fit into a well-known category. It
| incorporates elements of an operating system, an interactive
| development environment, and a programming language.
|
| >Meme TM is an operating system [...]
|
| >Meme TM is an interactive development environment [...]
|
| >Meme TM is a programming language [...]
|
| Meme Development System for Windows Product Specification:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990422114909/http://www.immers...
|
| >Required hardware: PC, 80386 or better with math coprocessor, 8
| MB RAM, VGA, mouse, Ethernet or 10BaseT card or modem (for
| network connection.)
|
| Meme Demos:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990504193428/http://www.immers...
|
| Meme Programming Guide:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980110220614/http://www.immers...
|
| [It's totally programmable in FORTH! What more is there to say?
| ;) So here's some code! ]
|
| >Writing Meme TM code
|
| >Writing code for use in a multi-user universe is an undertaking
| that requires some sophistication. Often, the programmer wants to
| try out an idea quickly, without concern for the demands of
| multi-user distributed programming.
|
| >For instance, let's assume the programmer would like to spin a
| ball, all alone, in the virtual world. Meme TM makes it easy to
| animate such a scene. The following text is the actual code that
| implements a spinning ball, and is very similar to the spinning
| ball demonstration on the demo page. The backslash character (\\)
| is used to delimit a comment to end-of-line.
|
| >The comments assume that each line is being typed by hand at
| Meme TM's command prompt, with pauses between the lines to
| observe the effect on the displayed scene. \
| First we create an eyepoint with which we view the scene.
| \ The eyepoint is initially positioned at the origin, looking
| down the \ negative Z axis (away from the user).
| Eye: eyepoint \ Let's put the eyepoint at +20 on the
| Z axis. This moves the camera \ away from the origin,
| towards the user. 10e0 eyepoint z! \ We put
| a ball in the scene. It is created at the origin. "
| sphere.rwx" Shape: ball \ Up until now, the display
| has remained blank. To draw a single frame \ on the
| display, we execute the meme "render". render
| \ There is now a ball on the display. Rather than type "render"
| each time \ we want to draw a frame, let's start a
| background task that redisplays the \ scene continuously.
| background r \ Define a new task called "r".
| begin \ Start of a looping structure
| render \ Draw one frame pause
| \ Switch to the next task again
| \ Loop forever ; \ End
| definition r wake \ Start
| execution of the rendering task. \ Let's define
| another background task to make the ball spin.
| background spin \ Define a new task called
| "spin". begin \ Start of a
| looping structure 1e0 ball yaw+! \
| Increment the yaw angle by one degree
| pause \ Switch to the next task again
| \ Loop forever ; \ End
| definition spin wake \ Start
| execution of the spinning task
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Interesting criticism from David Cake and Gavin Bell. Fortunately
| now we benefit from nice IDEs and other tools for editing popular
| programming languages (but none I know of for FORTH or
| PostScript, but there are lots of applications that edit or write
| out JavaScript and JSON and WebAssembly, even built into every
| browser ;).
|
| Before JavaScript was released on December 4, 1995, there
| actually was some disagreement about not just about which
| language to use, but whether a browser should include a Turing-
| complete programming language at all. Sun was pushing TCL as a
| contender, then RMS issued his fatwa against it, and Sun switched
| over to pushing Java (not because of RMS though ;).
|
| http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-vrml.1994/0268.html
| From: "Gavin Bell" <%20(fwd)"gavin@krypton.engr.sgi.com>
| Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 09:41:24 -0700 To: %20(fwd)"www-
| vrml@wired.com Subject: Re: Meme >Marc de
| Groot wrote: >>Meme has certain features that I would
| want to see in any specification for >>VRML. In
| particular, Meme allows the world designer to specify platform-
| >>independent executable code for the object's behavior. Without
| this >>ability, objects have relatively rigid,
| uninteresting behavior. David Cake replied:
| > Basically VRML browsers need to be basically include much of
| the function > of a simple interpretive language, and
| hopefully both a basically object > oriented one
| (personal preference, I guess), and one that is not too >
| verbose (for efficient use of low bandwidth). In this it would
| function > like most existing cross platform packages of
| various kinds (many database > packages, for example).
| [Gavin Bell replied:] One of the things I really
| like about HTML is that it is reasonably easy to write an
| editor that allows you to read in and then modify any
| HTML file. One of the things I really hate about
| PostScript is that is is really hard to write an editor
| that can edit an arbitrary PostScript file. Meme strikes
| me as more PostScript-like than HTML-like; it looks like
| it would be easy to write applications that wrote out Meme files,
| but it looks very difficult to write applications that
| provide a user-friendly interface for editing Meme files.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Why you should not use Tcl": Richard Stallman kicks off The
| Great TCL War.
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html
|
| Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu)
|
| Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400
|
| Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman, GNU Project.
|
| As interest builds in extensible application programs and
| tools, and some programmers are tempted to use Tcl, we should
| not forget the lessons learned from the first widely used
| extensible text editor--Emacs.
|
| The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions
| should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real
| programming language, designed for writing and maintaining
| substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
|
| Extensions are often large, complex programs in their own
| right, and the people who write them deserve the same
| facilities that other programmers rely on.
|
| The first Emacs used a string-processing language, TECO, which
| was inadequate. We made it serve, but it kept getting in our
| way. It made maintenance harder, and it made extensions harder
| to write. Later Emacs implementations have used more powerful
| languages because implementors learned from the problems of the
| first one.
|
| Another lesson from Emacs is that the way to make sure an
| extension facility is really flexible is to use it to write a
| large portion of the ordinary released system. If you try to do
| that with Tcl, you will encounter its limitations.
|
| Tcl was not designed to be a serious programming language. It
| was designed to be a "scripting language", on the assumption
| that a "scripting language" need not try to be a real
| programming language. So Tcl doesn't have the capabilities of
| one. It lacks arrays; it lacks structures from which you can
| make linked lists. It fakes having numbers, which works, but
| has to be slow. Tcl is ok for writing small programs, but when
| you push it beyond that, it becomes insufficient.
|
| Tcl has a peculiar syntax that appeals to hackers because of
| its simplicity. But Tcl syntax seems strange to most users. If
| Tcl does become the "standard scripting language", users will
| curse it for years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix
| shell syntax, and other de facto standards they feel stuck
| with.
|
| For these reasons, the GNU project is not going to use Tcl in
| GNU software. Instead we want to provide two languages, similar
| in semantics but with different syntaxes. One will be Lisp-
| like, and one will have a more traditional algebraic syntax.
| Both will provide useful data types such as structures and
| arrays. The former will provide a simple syntax that hackers
| like; the latter will offer non-hackers a syntax that they are
| more comfortable with.
|
| Some people plan to use Tcl because they want to use Tk.
| Thankfully, it is possible to use Tk without Tcl. A Scheme
| interpreter called STk is already available. Please, if you
| want to use Tk, use it with STk, not with Tcl. One place to get
| STk is from ftp.cs.indiana.edu:pub/scheme-
| repository/imp/STk-2.1.tar.Z
| kick wrote:
| Stallman was really seeing with clarity back then. It's kind
| of crazy that he doesn't get credit for the things he _did_
| unambiguously get right.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| He got immortalised as a Cassandra in XKCD, that's not
| nothing :)
|
| https://www.xkcd.com/743/
|
| (at least I assume that's RMS?)
| hjek wrote:
| When considering how much of the web currently depends on
| non-free JavaScript, perhaps in hindsight it would have
| been better in terms of freedom to have gone with a less
| capable language?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here's some (but not all) of the back-story behind the
| infamous TCL religious war waged in RMS's name.
|
| TIL Guile was named after "Guy L." (Steele)!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraf
| t...
|
| >My Scheme library was initially called "Gel" until we
| discovered trademark issues. Then we renamed the project
| Guile at the suggestion of one of my co-workers because
| "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts and because "guile"
| sounds a bit like "Guy L.").
|
| Also it was Sun, not RMS, who actually started the "TCL
| Wars" -- RMS was just responding to them:
|
| >Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a
| Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a
| vision:
|
| >Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for
| browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform"
| and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time.
| Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting
| language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that
| vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It
| was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that
| led to the Tcl wars.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092
|
| Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully
| and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic
| University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
|
| "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been
| explicitly designed to be embedded into applications.
| However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good
| support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms.
| We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their
| unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the
| free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf,
| it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own
| scripting language ... Because many potential users of the
| language were not professional programmers, the language
| should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation
| of the new language should be highly portable, because
| Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer
| platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf
| products would also need to embed a scripting language, the
| new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided
| as a library with a C API."
|
| http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I forgot to mention: this was from 1994!
|
| And for reference: This was more than a year before JavaScript
| was released on December 4, 1995. And a few months before RMS
| started The Great TCL War on September 23, 1994. The title of
| Official Scripting Language of the Web was still up for grabs.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
|
| I dug up this treasure from last century by looking up urls from
| old saved favorite emails with the Internet Archive:
|
| Marc de Groot made a brilliant multi-user networked VR system
| programmed in multitasking FORTH, called "MEME"!
|
| Here's his announcement that Brian Behlendorf forwarded to the
| www-vrml mailing list:
|
| http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-vrml.1994/0255.html
| From: marc@kg6kf.ampr.org (Marc de Groot - KG6KF)
| Subject: Meme To: www-vrml@wired.com Date: Wed,
| 22 Jun 94 11:26:25 PDT Hello. It's about time I
| introduced myself. I'm Marc de Groot, the founder of
| Immersive Systems, Inc. in San Francisco. I started
| ISI to sell Meme, which is a virtual world development
| system. Meme is intended to create a single shared virtual
| universe on the net. ISI released the alpha
| version of Meme last month. Meme stands for
| Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment. Meme started
| life as a programming language. Some "OS-level services" were
| added to the system, and finally the messaging mechanism
| was added to allow virtual objects to communicate. At
| this point, Meme is evolving into a communications
| protocol. I heartily agree with the statements that
| have been made on this mailing list about net software:
| make something proprietary, and the net hackers will
| write a free replacement which everyone will use. I
| intended to make the protocol public later this year, after ISI
| had fulfilled higher priority obligations, however the
| establishment of this list has prompted me to put some
| preliminary information on the net at this time. I have
| put up a WWW page for Immersive Systems. The URL is
| http://remarque.berkeley.edu/~marc/home.html >From
| the home page, you can read an overview of Meme, look at the
| programming manual, and download a demo world to try on
| your own PC. Meme has certain features that I would
| want to see in any specification for VRML. In particular,
| Meme allows the world designer to specify platform-
| independent executable code for the object's behavior. Without
| this ability, objects have relatively rigid,
| uninteresting behavior. That platform-independent
| code needs to load over the net with a minimum of
| overhead, and needs to execute efficiently. Meme satisfies both
| of these requirements. That completes my
| thoughts for now. I will post in the future, as time
| permits. Marc de Groot Immersive Systems,
| Inc. immersive@kg6kf.ampr.org
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