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> Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work. The SUN 2 was a tiny machine in comparison. 1 MB RAM, 4 MB max. 16MB virtual memory. > Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine
by lispm 11y ago
> Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work.
The SUN 2 was a tiny machine in comparison. 1 MB RAM, 4 MB max. 16MB virtual memory.
> Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine
The Symbolics 3600 was also a 680x0 machine. ;-) It used one as its frontend processor.
> Symbolics' original networking concept was that all machines would share some huge memory address space, with shared memory over Ethernet.
That was never a part of the Symbolics operating system. Not sure where you got that from.
> until they got the garbage collector and the virtual memory to understand each other.
Which SUN never got.
> Most of those fancy buttons on the keyboard didn't do much of anything.
Actually they did.
> SHIFT, CTL, TOP, META, SUPER, and HYPER were all shift keys, so there were 64 possible shifts for each key
There was a logical system behind it and different shift keys were used for different purposes. Not all combinations were used. It's not too different from any modern computer. My mac has command, option, control, fn, shift keys. Five. The Symbolics keyboard had shift, control, meta, super, hyper. Five.
- rjsw 11y agoLMI had a distributed virtual memory system.
- lispm 11y agoSymbolics used an object-database for that.
- Animats 11y agoEarly Symbolics 3600 machines had 256K words (36 bits) of memory. Later machines doubled this. Early Sun 2 machines had 1MB of RAM. Later machines had a minimum of 2MB, needed due to OS growth. So they were roughly comparable in memory capacity.
- lispm 11y agoI used a Symbolics 3600 much more memory, 4MWords IIRC. My own 3640 has 4MWord. A word was 36 bits wide. > So they were roughly comparable in memory capacity. Sure not: you could use a 3600 with 20 MB RAM and 150 MB virtual memory.
- hga 11y agoIn the preceding generation of CADR Lisp Machines built by the MIT-AI lab, I seem to remember that half a megaword of 32 bit words was not uncommon, and at least one had 2 megawords.
- rjsw 11y agoThe CADR could address 64MB of virtual memory, a fair bit more than a Sun-2.
- hga 11y ago24 bits word addressed. The 25 bits for the LMI LAMBDA (a microcode hack that no doubt incorporated the 2 space copying GC), and 28 bits for the Symbolics 3600 family. In all cases I'm pretty sure too little ^_^. There were a lot of Moore's law skeptics back then....