Comment by classichasclass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by classichasclass | Hacker News Reader

classichasclass

Got one of these myself (in a IIci with a Daystar accelerator and an 8-24-GC video card, 8MW of memory, standard Genera patched for Y2K). It was quite expensive to source and to rehabilitate. Lisp machines are a bit hard to get used to, and I definitely don't claim to be a Lisp deity, but their interfaces demonstrate a great deal of thought and orthogonality that's profoundly missing from a lot of modern UI.

Under the hood the MacIvory implements a Front-End Processor to mimic their workstations. It's a multistage boot: boot the Mac, start the FEP ("Breath of Life"), start Genera. Oddly, while the FEP on real Symbolics boxes is a 68K, the MacIvory CPU handles it directly, sort of like a bootloader.

There's a nice memory dump here: http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html

The FEP on 3600 was 68k - on Ivories FEP is normal Ivory program started from ROM.

The MacIvories and UX-series embeddable systems run FEP from their ROMs, but both FEP and OS on those use "Embedded" hardware model, where they use a memory-based buffer to provide "stream" used to communicate with "Life Support" software.

The VLM (Ivory rev5) systems, aka OpenGenera, don't have proper FEP (only a lisp debugger image) and in their case the LifeSupport application contains an embedded CPU implementation and implements loading of world files directly (thus bypassing the main purpose of FEP)

I have one whose enclosing/host Mac II no longer boots (I changed the CMOS battery, which was the cause last time, but no joy). No local Apple/Mac repair shop I can find will even look at it. Does anybody know a boutique, antique computer repair service?

In what general area do you live?

MA/NH, USA.

You might want to reach out to the guys at the Rhode Island Computer Museum. It's worth a trek down there anyway to get a tour of their warehouse.

http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/

The electrolytic capacitors in your Mac II are most likely dead and need to be replaced. It is reasonably easy to do if you are at all handy with a soldering iron. There are also many people that offer recapping as a service. Try asking on 68kMLA.

https://68kmla.org

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