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I wish someone would try to reimplement Symbolics Genera under an open source license and make it run on modern hardware properly, without VLM. Its design and p
by erikj 10y ago
I wish someone would try to reimplement Symbolics Genera under an open source license and make it run on modern hardware properly, without VLM. Its design and philosophy is quite different from Unix derivatives, being so object-oriented in the right parts and extensible on the source code level. The user interface was very reminiscent of the notebook interface in Mathematica - output in the listener wasn't plain text as in Unix CLI, but arbitrary objects like bitmaps or graphs or interactive widgets. You could click on any of them and inspect its state or open the source file that implements it.
- richardjdare 10y agoThe Genera terminal, or "listener" was a real eye opener for me the first time I used it. It can display rich text and images, has mouseable elements like buttons and editable forms, and has a powerful incremental online help system. It's almost like a kind of scrolling desktop. The thing I really liked was that the console output was independent of the input line. You can start typing in a command, hit <help> and have the (rich, hypertext) documentation appear in the console above where you are typing in. You don't have to delete everything and type man foo like in Unix, only to have the man page disappear when you quit. Simply in terms of usability the Genera listener craps on any Unix or Windows terminal I have used.