Xerox D-Machines (was Re: [rescue] The fat lady. . .)

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

>Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu>:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 08:13:59PM -0600, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
> > You want that? Been there done that. Find a Xerox 1186 (aka 6085)
> > running the Medley release of Interlisp. 20 years ahead of anything (yes
> > _anything_ ) on the market today. Be ready to live with dying monitors,
> > 5.25" full height disks, and power supplies but while she's running that
> > old D machine will blow anything else ever made out of the water. Other
> > bits will be faster; none will be more elegant. DWIM for example...or a
> > real structure editor (emacs is a sickly as vi once you've tried
> > that)... 
> 
> Err, how do the xerox machines compare to symbolics?  If I had the money, I 
> know where to get symbolics parts are support (namely from symbolics which is
> still in business, or in business again depending on how you care to look at 
> it).  But, you need to be willing to spend around a grand not including 
> shipping to be able to get much from them.

Well, I personally like the way that Interlisp did things better than the way 
MacLisp did things, so if I actually had a choice, I'd say the D-Machines were 
better. OTOH, as you say, you can still buy a Symbolics machine. When I get the 
spare change I need to buy a VME Sun-3 or 4 and then get a UX-400 board from 
them for roughly $500. It's an Ivory CPU (with 4 MWords I think) on a VME card 
that then runs Genera under X - only runs on SunOS 4.1.something I think, but 
it's probably the cheapest way to get a Genera box running. 


> -- 
> Joshua D. Boyd
> 

William