Re: GETF Speedup?

Wow! Thanks for that reference.

Zetalisp !! 

Holy Cow, I remember using Zeta Lisp back around 1975 (??). Just before Gerald Ford told NYC to “go to hell!” regarding its finances.

I was working on Madison Ave. around 70’th street or so. I think it was the old IBM Building. Just a meager grad student.

Those guys were running a SuperTanker Leasing company, funded by the famous Pirelli of Italy. They came to interview me at CCNY where I was studying Physics, and they asked me how much I wanted to work 20 hours/week for them? I was running the computer center software support activities in our Physics dept, on a DEC PDP-20 with 256 KB of storage !!

I remember telling them I would do it for $100 per week. And they chuckled and choked, and said, “How about $400 / week?”. Heh!!

I was so poor that I only had one pair of bluejeans, one shirt, and an old Army jacket that my brother gave me from his tour in S. Korea. 

The guys at the leasing agency have me $200 and the name of a tailor down the street, and told me to go get a haircut and buy a suit, to become presentable to their clients. Heh!! I had shoulder length hair at the time.

But alas, I was there to study Physics, and my Comprehensives were coming up in a month or so, 4 days of 4 hours each. I didn’t have a Bachelor’s Degree at the time, and was working toward a PhD on a provisional basis. They said everyone gets 2 tries at the Comprehensives, but since I didn’t have my Bachelor’s degree, I would only get 1 chance at them. And that year, nobody, out of 50, passed the exams.

So, I dropped kicked the lavish pay after a few weeks and went back to studying my buns off. When I took the exams, only two of us, out of 50, passed the exams. Heh! 

I don’t know, looking back, whether that was a smart or a dumb move… I think smart.


> On Oct 13, 2025, at 11:14, Bradford Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> This discussion reminds me of the Symbolics “Table Management Facility” (q.v. https://www.chai.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/documentation/Symbolics-Common-Lisp-Language-Concepts.pdf ). 
> 
> The basic idea was you used the common lisp hash table interface in your code, and the machine would organize it for efficiency based on size (you could predeclare a size so you didn’t pay a runtime penalty for reorganization). 
> 
>> On Oct 13, 2025, at 2:06 PM, Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie) <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 13 Oct 2025, at 17:28, David McClain <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> And now the count is down to 10 associations!!
>> 
>> Pretty much what Bradshaw’s tests showed. 10 key/value pairs should still be sufficient for small time dictionary storage, especially if you place frequently used items at the top of the list. 
>> 
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