Telescript (programming language)

A long time ago, I wrote a library that could marshal a running Ruby program over a socket to another VM. It seemed like a cool idea at the time, but I never found a good use for it. Turns out it's simpler to send the source code over the wire instead.

Interesting that the concept of Cloud Computing dates back to at least 1994:<p>&gt; &quot;The beauty of Telescript,&quot; says Andy, &quot;is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of information and create sort of a virtual service. No one had conceived that before.<p>(from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1994&#x2F;04&#x2F;general-magic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1994&#x2F;04&#x2F;general-magic&#x2F;</a>)

For anyone else amazed by General Magic, the recently released documentary is available for free (legally) on YouTube: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;JQymn5flcek?si=zm-PJtQExOHol7r-" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;JQymn5flcek?si=zm-PJtQExOHol7r-</a>

I actually worked on this at the beginning of my career (I still have the mug to prove it), quickly concluded the technology was inadequate and doomed (mostly due to considerations around atomic transactions), and bailed shortly after.<p>General Magic had a partnership with AT&amp;T and they did much of the heavy lifting to make it semi-viable, for instance Bell Labs developed &quot;High Telescript&quot; (the underlying Telescript was more akin to Forth). AT&amp;T expended a ridiculous amount of money on the project, with almost no revenue to show up for it, but some of those investments like their dialup modem server or their email platform were later repurposed in their Internet Service Provider offering.

As someone interested in obscure (extinct?) Programming Languages, Telescript always struck me as interesting as it apparently followed the Agent Programming paradigm, but as no one is maintaining the language anymore, I guess its lost to time.

This shook me:<p>In 1990, Marc Porat convinced then-Apple-CEO John Sculley that the future of computing lay not in desktop personal computers, but much smaller portable devices combining computing power, communications systems, and data located on network-accessible servers.[1] He noted that portable computers would always have less power than the machines they would connect to, and suggested that this be part of the design - instead of trying to build a portable computer that could perform the tasks of a desktop system, the portable device should invisibly use the computational power of the servers to produce a similar result.

Related:<p><i>Telescript programming language</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17483436">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17483436</a> - July 2018 (13 comments)

If you have a classic Mac or emulator you can get a MagicCap emulator and SDK. I even toyed with making a High Telescript server but that would be a lot of work with almost no documentation.<p>If you want to mess around with the emulator and SDK you need a FPU in a 68K Mac or the PowerFPU extension in a PowerPC Mac. Despite the bad name that extension adds emulated 68K FPU to the 68K emulation.

This reminds me of Smalltalk image model and Temporal.<p>Migratable processes would be useful to shutdown my machine, move it and then resume where I left off, a bit like hibernate.<p>This reminds me of X11 server&#x2F;client model a bit.

How did the server side prevent infinite loops?