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Ray Arachelian -- thanks for all your many contributions, you will be missed!

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Lisa2:

--- Quote from: Ray ---Raise a glass to me and play this: Amon Amarth - One Thousand Burning Arrows - I know it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Just been listening to that song as I'm facing my mortality, and it's soothing. So kinda want that song played at my funeral.
--- End quote ---

This reminds me of another music related Ray story of mine that folks here may find interesting.  About 10 years ago I wanted to port LisaEm to the ( then new ) original Raspberry Pi.   It ended up taking days for me to compile and chase down issues with the port.  In the process I spent a lot time digging deep into Ray's source code, and he had many comment lines about music or verses from songs.   A few years later ( in 2018 ) I asked Ray about these comments and this was his reply:

"So, about the comments... most are just song lyrics from whatever I was listening to at the time that gave me that extra bit of energy to plow through and not just give up. And as I re-read the code and see those, they kind help propel me again. Unfortunately when writing an emulator you can't see output until you're more than 90% done because it won't actually run anything, and it's really difficult to keep working on it and stay the course when you have nearly zero feedback as to actual progress. 
Since you've enjoyed the comments, I'll share a bit of what's coming in 1.2.7.  Unlike the seemingly random and song lyrics comments as easter eggs, 1.2.7 adds Futurama inspired quotes. If you're a fan of that now cult show, you'll remember their title sequence captions (see: https://theinfosphere.org/List_of_title_captions ).  It's nuggets like "Not Affiliated With the Sun Remarketting Brass Knuckle Company", ">>Not Y1.995K Compliant<<",  "Featuring gratuitous rectangular pixels", or "There's No NiCAD Like Leaky NiCAD!" These replace the simple "Welcome to LisaEm" in the status bar, and you get a random one each time you launch LisaEm. There's also one that's Archer inspired:   "Unleaded solder? Do you want tin whiskers, because that's how you get tin whiskers!" an an actual quote from Frank Ludolph himself that he provided for 1.2.7.

Why Futurama? Because it was itself a spoof of how people in the 1980s (and even 1950s) thought the future would be, and because it was canceled multiple times. Which funnily enough parallels a lot of the Lisa's history. The Lisa was what Apple thought would be the Future, but instead, we got the Mac. Which wasn't bad, but it was a very different thing, if far bright than the Lisa was in 1984. And then, the Lisa was killed, but reborn as the XL, and then finally destroyed in a landfill. And now it's reborn via LisaEm, and the efforts of Sapient in ways similar to Futurama being killed off by Fox, and moving to Cartoon Network as movies and then as one final season, and then being kicked off Netflix and then being picked up by the SyiFi channel, etc. (I still have my DVR record Futurama, and watch reruns occasionally!)
And best of all, LisaEm will never make it to the Apple App Store because it's an emulator, so in a way modern Apple Inc. is killing off the Lisa's resurrection again!"

Fantastic!  Love it.  Rest in peace Ray, you will be missed!

Rick

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