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Comment by crististm | Hacker News Reader

I've managed today to boot OpenGenera in a Linux VM. It took me a couple of weeks but it finally works. I intend to have a look myself at what the fuss is all about.

If you're interested, here are some pointers to relevant resources (snap4.tar.gz image works as advertised):

http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html

http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux

http://libarynth.org/vlm_on_linux

The opengenera tar-ball can be found in the intertubes.

Tip: Use Ubuntu 7.04 x86-64 to save you some trouble. I don't know what is the most recent distro that works but 10.10 doesn't. You get a blank window because recent X servers are missing something. Before proceeding with the installation, complete the Ubuntu image with relevant archive server URLs to be able to apt-get with ease.

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It would be great if someone (anonymously) could get a working OpenGenera VM and upload the image so that people could skip all these steps and try it out immediately.

you are aware that this is proprietary software and that there is a legal owner?

Who is the legal owner? I never heard what the final resolution of the probate process was.

EDITED to add:

Oh, I guess David Schmidt owns all of it now [0]: Symbolics is currently a privately held company which acquired the assets and intellectual property of the old public company called Symbolics, Inc.

[0] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/

According to a YouTube comment made 8 months ago by Kalman Reti — the 'last Symbolics developer'— Symbolics IP is owned by John Mallery.

"The problem is that the Symbolics IP is now owned by John Mallery; he has stated he has plans for making it available but so far (several years) has not yet done so. Until he does so, only two groups (that I am aware of) have access through prior contracts with the previous owner of the IP, namely MIT (and anyone officially associated with it) and customers of the Symbolics maintenance business (and independent company) run by David K. Schmidt."

http://www.youtube.com/comment?lc=iMqNHkTp2Oy525xIKnQM_vOmFV...

I bought my MacIvory from David Schmidt about 4 years ago. At that time, it was my understanding that David only owned the maintenance contracts from Symbolics as well as the ability to sell Symbolics hardware. The intellectual property for Genera was owned by John Mallery (http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/926)

What's the fuss all about? A lot, but please bear in mind the time this was developed. We are now in 2014. We are talking about something about 30 yrs old. A good way to really compare is to go compare with an Apple ][.

It certainly should not be compared with an Apple ][: the last Symbolics machine was introduced in 1992, the NXP1000. They were still adding features and such at that time, and the Apple ][ was long obsolete at that time.

There are some enlightening comments from Kent Pitman on comp.lang.lisp, which give a sense of what kinds of features the Lisp machines provided to developers, and why they still haven't been matched by contemporary systems:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/o...

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/X...

Yes - I'm aware about what this is about. From the point of view of a developer, all demos show something that is missing in today's tools.

To compare it to Apple ][ is a bit too stretched. Lisp machines were developer machines. Machines for professionals in computing technology. We don't have that today. For example, what is the equivalent package or distro that transforms your PC in a "developer machine". You don't have anything like that. All you can do is stitch together some emacs/vi/gdb whatever and search some blogs when you're stuck. And beyond that you are not able to go and fix some IDE bugs _live_.

Today we're missing a machine for professional programmer.

/sad

I think multimedia computing, as introduced by Amiga did more for AI, speaking in terms of games, than the Lisp Machines. I do think the jack of all trades approach is useful for sharing data across computers and professions.

It's sad to see the demise of the professional multimedia computer to tablets and tablet-laptops.

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