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I imagine that the hard part is probably not making a lisp machine but making what made the lisp machines so special: it's software and tooling. My understandi

I imagine that the hard part is probably not making a lisp machine but making what made the lisp machines so special: it's software and tooling. My understanding is that the tooling available on lisp machines was so good it made emacs look rigid and dumb. I'd imagine that reacreating such tooling would take more man hours that building the lisp machine and its kernel but I don't know.

rjsw 8y ago
You could start with the old software, the MIT tree has been released. I have copies of the final LMI software including the K-machine stuff. The software wasn't dumb, there was just a lot less of it. They didn't have IPv6, SSL, a web browser ... One halfway house would be a Lisp unikernel.
mepian 8y ago
Perhaps the open-sourced software for the original MIT CADR Lisp machine could be used as the starting point: https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software
pinewurst 8y ago
An LMI Lambda (shipped 1st gen machine that was an evolved MIT CADR) emulator is at: https://github.com/dseagrav/ld https://github.com/dseagrav/ld