[rescue] 3630 3645

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 10:01:47PM +0100, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> On 2002.01.09 20:19 "Fogg, James" wrote:
> 
> > Dude, this is an hour from me. I would be interested in a look-see.
> > So, ah... what does a Symbolics run for O/S?
> Genera, a LISP system. Everything on a Symbolics is done in LISP. The
> weired thing about this machines is: They interpret LISP bytecode in
> _hardware_. The CPUs of this machines are huge bit slice CPUs. They are
> absolutely dumb at power on. They get "smart" after the they are feed
> with microcode by the front end processor. I know someone here in
> Germany/Kaiserslautern who has several Symbolics machines of all age,
> including a bunch of 364[05]. Whe were working on one 3645 to get it
> running and reinstall the OS... 
> 
> These machines are really the most weird computers I ever saw. Have a
> look at:
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html
> 
> Rescue this machines. Please. ;-)

I want to try to.  Of note, Symbolics still does business in LA and DC and will
sell you new machines from 3645s to XL1200s (but not MacIvoryIIIs).  They just
want a lot of money which may be worth it, but I don't have enough cache to
spend over $1k on a machine that I've never used anything like before.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd