[rescue] SYMBOLICS Information (was: Wooohhhooo XP -> 0 to BSOD )in 12min23sec

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On October 27, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > WTF is genera? I'd google, but "genera" is too close to "general" to yield a
> > useful google visit...
> 
>   I'd search for "genera -general". :)
> 
>   Genera is the OS that runs on Symbolics LISP machines.  Nowadays, as
> I understand, it runs on Alphas.

Well... it was not just an OS per se since the OS itself was actually
LISP, but it was the machine interface/user/development environment for
the SYMBOLICS, so it was an OS but it was quite different from what the
definition of OSs has been for the past decade or so. It was way ahead
of its time, it was fully Object Oriented (it was LISP afterall), it had
hypertex documentation and a GUI in the mid eighties which was far better
than anything else out there, it even had a TCP/IP stack since its
inception and they were designed with networking in mind. Plus you could
extend the environment with your own LISP modules. The environment was
later ported to Alphas. These machines were also used not just on AI but
also as high end graphics workstation, I think SYMBOLICS was the 1st
company that offered HDTV capable image generators.... which was something
very cool in the mid/late 80s!

The Alpha port is named "OpenGenera" like everything that came from the
late 80s/early 90s. I have a link w. a paper about the system:  
http://pt.withington.org/VLM.html

Genera also ran on the Ivory LISP machines by SYMBOLICS, which were a
NuBus implementation of the LISP processor and run under MacOS. There were
also VME versions of the Ivory board for SUN hosts.... For pictures of
these boards (and other symbolics systems): 
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/next-generation.html

I always wanted to get one of these puppies! Genera has always been
considered one of the best development environments ever (the best for
LISP at least). And, yeah I like LISP and I am a proud SCHEME user :-)

Cheers!