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Comment by _f1dq | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any recommendations for a Lisp Machine emulator for Mac?

The Interlisp-D system from Xerox/... is available: https://interlisp.org . Expect a real parallel universe. Even for a Lisp programmer this will challenge what one expects from a development system.

The Symbolics system is only available as a pirated and slighty buggy software for Linux (also in VM running Linux). A better version exists, but that one is only available in limited commercial form. It's another parallel universe from 30 years ago. Most development basically stopped mid 90s.

In a way that's great: it will be lightning fast compared to running on the original hardware (many orders of magnitude) and it won't be affected by all the bloat that they didn't tack on during the last 30 years.

The owner of the Symbolics IP is an unbelievable idiot for not making sure the modern emulator is distributed far and wide, with source, so people can experiment with and enhance it. That’s the only value it holds today but they seem determined to squander it by not putting it out.

That would let too many people into the Lisp priesthood, can't have that kind of shenanigans going on.

I'm out

Why’s that? You support keeping everything related to Symbolics locked up and hidden from the public? It’s 30 years old, it has no actual value besides research.

There are people who work on preserving and making sure it can become available one day.

They will also give you that answer, for various reasons.

As well as the ones lispm has described there are emulators for MIT CADR, LMI and TI Lisp Machines. The LMI one [1] is the most complete of these.

[1] https://github.com/dseagrav/ld

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