points by DonHopkins 8 years ago

The cover of the Lisp Machine Manual had the title printed in all caps diagonally wrapped around the spine, so on the front you could only read "LISP CHINE NUAL". So the title was phonetically pronounced: "Lisp Sheen Nual".

My friend Nick made a run of custom silkscreened orange LISP CHINE NUAL t-shirts (most places won't print around the side like that).

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=74206161754&l=54ec4e...

I was wearing mine in Amsterdam at Dappermarkt on Queen's Day (when everyone's supposed to wear orange, so I didn't stand out), and some random hacker (who turned out to be a university grad student) came up to me at random and said he recognized my t-shirt!

http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt

CHINE NUAL (sheen'yu-:l) noun.

The reference manual for the Lisp Machine, a computer designed at MIT especially for running the LISP language. It is called this because the title, LISP MACHINE MANUAL, appears in big block letters -- wrapped around the cover in such a way that you have to open the cover out flat to see the whole thing. If you look at just the front cover, you see only part of the title, and it reads "LISP CHINE NUAL"