The author is also one of the developers of the Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine used in Open (and now Portable) Genera: http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html
"Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain.
nah. what you are describing is Open in the present day, like OpenAI.
back in the day it meant "open standards, allowing cooperation between secretive competitors". IBM and Digital could both implement to an open standard instead of their traditional proprietary so their devices would interoperate.
This type of openness is what Microsoft liked to "embrace, extend, extinguish", meaning "we'll get kudos joining the interoperating consortium, we'll look cutting edge by adding features which would make us not actually interoperate but are useful so people will adopt them, then we will have killed off this threat to our monopoly"
in that same period of time, open source started to be called that because what was open was the source.
Open Genera in the early 90s then ran on OSF/1 UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 , renamed to Digital UNIX) on DEC Alpha. OSF meant Open Software Foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation ), a group propagating "open standards" for UNIX.
Instead of having slow-ish boot times in a Lisp machine, GNU's plan was to put several memory-protected concurrent interpreters under Unix, giving the user far more power by default with GNU/Hurd against a common Unix users. WIth namespaces, for instance, you could forget about suid and/or needing group perms to mount a device or access different media and soundcards.
Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same).
The MIT version of the Lisp Machine is free software without any legal conundrums. So there you go …
not true
System 99 has support for Common Lisp. System 301 will hopefully have better support than Genera (seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway) at that.
The Document Examiner is a separate system (and LMI did it differently, with Gateway), and not part of the base System. X11, and NFS likewise. So listing a bunch of orthogonal systems isn't really what was being discussed.
I don't see much of that in System 99 from MIT.
Stuff like X11 and NFS is also not random stuff. Open Genera uses it for its console and its files.
> seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway
Well enough that it is able to run a lot of its software written in Common Lisp. It's able to run stuff like PCL, ASDF, ITERATE, ...
System 99 is from 1984 (?), Symbolics started in 81/82. Open Genera appeared 1992/93. You are ignoring a full decade of development.
Earlier:
> Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same).
I would guess that less than 20% of the core SYSTEM is essentially the same (but often quite a bit enhanced). For the rest of the software, I would think it's even less. Which is not surprising, since System 99 did not support the 3600 systems, the G-Machines, the I-machines (XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, NXP1000, MacIvory 1/2/3, ...), Open Genera, ..., because all that was developed later by Symbolics.
ZWEI, TV and SI makes up the majority of the base system which is far more than "20%" percent, which is ignoring EH, WINDOW, and anything else that is essentially processor agnostic.
The target processor is not that important from the users point of view, to the point that Lambda and CADR shared the exact same source code, and microcode. The Explorer I was essentially a Lambda. Much was "feature" protected with #+/#- to the point where many of the systems worked on Genera as well.
So that seems at par with the CPU architectures that Symbolics made, which is "just" a change to the compiler .. and not the overall system .. which is what was being discussed. But yes, Symbolics did design hardware done by Symbolics and made sure it worked on their system .. not sure what your point is other than giving an incorrect view of history and what Symbolics actually did to the Lisp Machine system parts (Symbolics work was much more interesting when it came to other systems like the 3D stuff and what not).
> The target processor is not that important from the users point of view
It's important for the operating system and the processor was used for very different machine hardware: standalone workstations, headless systems, embedded in a Mac, embedded in a SUN, embedded in a network switch, ...
> Lambda and CADR shared the exact same source code, and microcode.
But not the 3600, which was a 36 bit architecture and not the Ivory, which was a 40 bit microprocessor. A lot of the core routines were different on a 3600 and an Ivory machine. The VLM was even different, running on a 64bit microprocessor, implementing the emulator in C and assembler. There is low-level functionality which has two or three different implementations.
The Ivory machines could be very different from a LAMBDA and a CADR, for example as an embedded CPU in a very different host machine (Mac & SUN). That had a lot of consequences for the operating system.
Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)…
System 200 ran in the CADR and 3600. Using the same code base, with different microcode. With just bunch of #+ and #-.
And no, the target is not that important that it makes up “80% of the system”.
Your going into tangents and constantly raising neg things not being discussed, we aren’t talking about the host architecture but about the Lisp Machine system which is mostly agnostic of the target CPU. And between those two, Genera and the MIT system, are essentially the same when it comes to the base layer. To the point you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work.
Genera 9 (which started development just a few years ago going of a system that hadn’t been touched for 30 years and under dubious legal situation) is essentially Genera 8.5 with several fixes.
Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system. And that is one of the reasons why feature and code are so similar.
Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff.
The error handler is not the same anymore.
> you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work
I think that's pure fantasy.
> Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system.
I don't think that was a goal, given that the MIT system was not relevant anymore and the vendors all had their own forks. TI converted much of the old code to Common Lisp with a translator. Symbolics wrote most new code in Common Lisp.
Without an extensive implementation of Common Lisp incl. CLOS, basically nothing runs on the old system.
The times of a few conditional reader macros was soon over.
Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?
https://github.com/binghe/PCL/tree/master/impl
It lacks a port, but there are ports to TI and Symbolics. That should be simple.
Plenty of people still do, e.g. on a Ivory or 36xx machines.
> I think that's pure fantasy.
I ported the Dynamic Listener (with large parts of DW) a bunch of years back to run on MIT System 78.
> ... MIT system was not relevant anymore ...
I realise you like to raise Symbolics to the skies, but to say that the MIT system, which then was continued by LMI was "not relevant" is just making up history. Both systems where still heavily used until the demise of Symbolics, and LMI and portability was absolutely one goal since breaking peoples code was not considered nice.
> Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?
No idea, LOOP on the MIT Lisp Machine is the standard Loop, feel free to port it though -- patches welcome as they say.
> Well enough that it is able to run a lot of its software written in Common Lisp. It's able to run stuff like PCL, ASDF, ITERATE, ...
No it is not. You are thinking of Portable Genera.
> System 99 is from 1984 (?), Symbolics started in 81/82. Open Genera appeared 1992/93. You are ignoring a full decade of development.
System 99.32 is from 1987, which continued via LMI into System 130. Genera, or before when it got forked, is from 1978 when it got forked from System 78 or there about being re-branded into System 200. All three (four if you count TI -- which did quite more in renaming things making it hard to follow) with parallel development going on from there into the early 1990s.
Genera is a Lisp Machine system based on the work done at MIT, where most of the guts still the same. To the point that how you rebootstrap the system is the same, how the core areas look work, how the scheduler works, how the windowing system works, how flavours works, etc.
Open Genera did very little on top of Genera at that, mostly targeting and making it work on the Ivory. You are purposefully conflating Portable Genera, Open Genera and Genera.
> You mention a bunch of things that are also _not_ part of Genera
Of course they are. I have the thing right in front of me, running. I'm typing to it. I'm looking at the system definition of SYSTEM 501. On a live running Genera 9 on a VLM. If I would look at my MacIvory running Genera 8 it also would not look much too different.
Stuff like EH has been long superseded. The Scheduler has been redesigned & rewritten. TV has mostly been superseded by Dynamic Windows. The Garbage Collector has been extended, by new GC variants.
> Open Genera did very little on top of Genera at that, mostly targeting and making it work on the Ivory.
Open Genera does not work on the Ivory processor. It's a Virtual Lisp Machine.
> Genera is a Lisp Machine system based on the work done at MIT, where most of the guts still the same. To the point that how you rebootstrap the system is the same, how the core areas look work, how the scheduler works, how the windowing system works, how flavours works, etc.
The Scheduler works different (the old scheduler polled, the new own is event driven), the window system is now Dynamic Windows, Flavors has been updated to New Flavors & the new CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System), ...
ams's hyperbolic perhaps point is that genera is significantly SYSTEM, that symbolics contribution is a kind of obvious extension of the grand vision that was already there in its totality and potential in the MIT's work. I think it's a valid argument, which I don't think can be resolved just by listing names of subsystems.
for example you can't just say "oh they replaced tv and window with dynamic windows", because dw uses both tv and legacy, for lack of better term, window. if you look at the flavor definition of basic dynamic-window it uses tv:stream-mixin tv:graphics-mixin and tv:minimum-window. and tv minimum-window is a venerable SYSTEM flavor. not to mention that other systems (like zwei) still use tv window directly. how thick a layer dynamic-window is on top of tv? answering that question require systems level knowledge and investigation.
other symbolics extensions are of similar nature.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. It's not related to what I wrote.
> how thick a layer dynamic-window is on top of tv? answering that question require systems level knowledge and investigation.
Dynamic Windows introduced a new UI look and feel, different from the old "static windows". DW has new APIs even for reimplementations of old UI features from TV , like the new drawing interface in the graphics package, which replaces the old TV flavor messages, with generic functions. It has also a lot of new features, like the presentation system. Later applications typically will use the new DW interfaces and new features. Both DW and TC are documented in "Programming the User Interface", with DW providing much of the high-level application window features, described in the first chapters.
There is another version of it, in another implementation, which is CLIM, which is then based on CLOS. Even later applications were thought to use the CLIM interfaces, to be able to write portable user interfaces, able to run on various other Lisp systems. Both DW and CLIM are substantially different from TV. Neither DW, nor CLIM are in the MIT software.
Other symbolics extensions are of similar nature.
Sure, and those extensions can run on the MIT Lisp Machine.
But we are taking about the base system. Not extensions. And why one can take those systems and for the most part just run them in another system is cause they are so similar!
The reason is as I said before, Genera is layers on top of an existing system that hasn't changed (much).
E.g, DW is of flavours on top of TV (with lots and lots of extra additions .. additions are easy to handle -- after all the DW code is like 1M of Lisp from 1989 or whatever).
The Dynamic Listener was more complicated to rip out, but mostly work. The hard part, at which I gave up, was adding all the presentations for objects and other such.
DW/CLIM treated TV as one possible driver, if not sidestepped it, the problem was that some software (iirc mainly related to some S-Graphics products) had some hardcoded TV dependencies from earlier versions - it's mentioned as part of the porting plans for OpenGenera, because OpenGenera has no working TV subsystem at all, because TV didn't work over X11.
But that was the case on other machines, too. The embedded UX400/1200 machines and the headless NXP1000 use an X11 console, too.
Lots of TV software does not run on these machines, because they don't have a framebuffer.
Ivory support was implemented in Genera 7.3. Open Genera added the virtual machine to run on DEC Alpha hardware, it was Genera 8.3 + VLM, upgraded to Genera 8.5 with Open Genera 2.0.
However, he only actually owns it if Andrew Topping actually paid the Symbolics bankruptcy executor for it in full. (Not doing so would entirely fit Topping's character, based on his criminal rap sheet.) If Topping didn't fully pay for it, then it still belongs to whoever or whatever the successor of the Symbolics bankruptcy executor is; I think that was ABN AMRO.
Good luck finding any of that out!
It even appears there's ongoing development, but in some secretive fashion: https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553491209727096 (by the same dude who wrote TFA).
Could anyone more knowledgeable provide firther direction?
Not free. This is useless for preservation. Just compare it against Medley/Interlisp.