I happened to be at the 40th LISP anniversary conference 1998, with John McCarthy. Erann's JPL talk about the Remote Agent was by far the most interesting talk there, and I still consider it one of the best conference talks ever.
I'd really like to see the slides being published.
I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other side: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/06/my-dinner-with-erik.html
I liked Eric a lot, and really enjoyed his troll interactions with Xah Lee, one of the most famous trolls ever. Unfortunately he didn't know exactly who to pick a fight with. Erann was clearly the wrong target. Erann hated it.
But as outsiders who stayed out of those silly fights we learned a lot, what boils in a LISPer. XML especially. Or Windows. Or special variables: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/WRQkT57... A very good CLL thread btw. Most of the people agreed with Eric, even if Erann's proposal was very good.
(I used his old name to be able to look things up. The name change happened much later, when Erann got married and choose a better name, Ron Garret.)
Xah Lee still updates his 1995 domain http://xahlee.org/ "the hacker news yc is truly idiotic. when in tablet, need a microscope to read. 1990s html, written in a born dead arc lisp."
There's this (edit: 2012 Google Tech Talks) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ "The Remote Agent Experiment: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away" by Ron Garret. IDK how similar it is to the 1998 talk by him you refer to. I guess he's around here by the nick "lisper".
Yes, that's about the same content. Excellent, thanks a lot.
I often think about how to control or even reboot a CPU out there in space, running on slow hardened HW (cosmic rays shooting at you), and if you make a small mistake and the thing doesn't boot up properly the whole mission is lost.
You must be really sure about the root cause of your problem, and properly analyze it (hence his simulation), otherwise no chance.
Like a reboot via SSH, just a bit trickier, because nobody will be able to help you.
Just talked with Ron Garret about this dinner event. They were actually 2 separate events. His blog post was about a dinner with those two alone, and I was with them on another evening, me sitting next to Eric.
Interesting events 19 years ago. Ron changed his name in the meantime (and made Google AdSense), while Eric died horribly. Alone. From a stomach problem or such.
I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other side: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/06/my-dinner-with-erik.html I liked Eric a lot, and really enjoyed his troll interactions with Xah Lee, one of the most famous trolls ever. Unfortunately he didn't know exactly who to pick a fight with. Erann was clearly the wrong target. Erann hated it. But as outsiders who stayed out of those silly fights we learned a lot, what boils in a LISPer. XML especially. Or Windows. Or special variables: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/WRQkT57... A very good CLL thread btw. Most of the people agreed with Eric, even if Erann's proposal was very good.
(I used his old name to be able to look things up. The name change happened much later, when Erann got married and choose a better name, Ron Garret.)
PS: Eric said 99 in his lugm blog post, but I'm pretty sure it was 98. http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
PPS: I found some old RA material here: https://web.archive.org/web/19991014000627/http://www-aig.jp... but mostly for ESL (the control language), not the actual RA simulation and HW stuff he was emulating.