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OpenGenera on Alpha runs amazingly faster than any of the real iron Symbolics hardware, including the NuBus MacIvories that got embedded in old Macs like the Qu
by reikonomusha 8y ago
OpenGenera on Alpha runs amazingly faster than any of the real iron Symbolics hardware, including the NuBus MacIvories that got embedded in old Macs like the Quadra. You can also put plenty of memory and disk into one of these often server-grade machines. The negative? You don’t get to use the amazing Symbolics keyboards. You have to deal with Tru64 UNIX. You have to run everything through X.
AFAIK, the unofficial x86 port of OpenGenera is an emulator for Alpha which emulates the Lisp machine, and all together it’s still much faster.
I had the pleasure of figuring out how to get X keyboard codes from a Linux box into the emulated Genera. What a pain! As far as I know, the “world building” code has been lost so it’s not even possible to bootstrap a Genera system from scratch. (You can dump worlds from memory of an existing Genera system though.) I think this limitation made it difficult to change some hard coded constants, like the size of the communication buffer which was essentially shared memory between the running Genera system and the host operating system.
I wish this software could be preserved properly, instead of sitting under a rain cloud of uncertain legal standing. I don’t remember exactly how the story goes, but Symbolics software fell into the hands of Andrew Topping, who died, and whose estate went to John Mallery (at one time famous for writing a Lisp HTTP web server than ran the White House website), and he had held onto the IP rights since, with no indication of selling or releasing it.
(Common Lisp historians / Symbolics enthusiasts, please correct any errors I’ve made. :))
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoThe only thing I’d add is that the emulator has since been ported to Linux and it’s perfectly possible to emulate a lisp machine on a modern Linux distribution (you can find instructions online for Ubuntu, but it should be fairly easy to figure out how to adapt them for an arbitrary distribution). However, the IP issues make running such a system a somewhat grey area.
- armitron 8y agoThe emulator you have in mind (Brad Parker's) has a lot of bugs and is not exactly stable.
- jf 8y agoI can confirm that John Mallery has the IP rights to Genera and has no interest in selling those rights. I also have a 1U rackmount DEC Alpha that I will give free to anybody in the Bay Area. I intended to use it to run Open Genera but ended up purchasing a Mac Ivory instead.
- lispm 8y ago> the unofficial x86 port of OpenGenera is an emulator for Alpha which emulates the Lisp machine You can run the official Open Genera emulator in an Alpha/Tru64 UNIX emulator on top of an Intel CPU. But the 'unofficial' port is actually a direct port of the Open Genera emulator to 64bit x86.
- armitron 8y agoWhich Alpha/Tru64 UNIX emulator do you have in mind?
- rbanffy 8y ago> The negative? You don’t get to use the amazing Symbolics keyboards. Can't that be solved by ordering PCBs, your favorite switches, and custom key caps? BTW, has nobody 3D scanned those keycaps on their newer keyboards? The older model seems pretty standard sculpted spherical top ones. > AFAIK, the unofficial x86 port of OpenGenera is an emulator for Alpha which emulates the Lisp machine, and all together it’s still much faster. Is there a place this unofficial port can be seen?
- frostburg 8y agoThe originals use rather exotic hall effect switches. There are decent (if expensive) replica keycaps around, but they're not in the same profile etc.
- rbanffy 8y agoThe switches, which is what drives most of the "feel" of the keyboard, must have been standard parts (the older ones were, AFAIK, Honeywell) and I would be surprised there aren't any manufacturers of similar parts making them now. We can try at least to characterize the action (force x displacement curve, contact point, audible feedback) of the switches to find something similar. As for the keycaps, 3D printing will only get better. We may need to wait a couple years, but we'll have them.
- cbm-vic-20 8y agoThe keyboard fanatics over at https://reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards https://reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards can probably hook you up. The "space cadet" keyboard is revered there.
- leoc 8y agoThis is more Deskthority https://deskthority.net/ https://deskthority.net/ country I'd think. Thomas Ran has YouTube videos on the Space Cadet keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw and several other Hall-effect specimens.
- lispm 8y ago> The negative? You don’t get to use the amazing Symbolics keyboards. With a special USB-Adapter one can use them on computers with USB.
- reikonomusha 8y agoI have one such PS/2 adapter and for me it works quite awfully. The key timing is all wrong, key repeat is especially prone, etc. Maybe I was just quite unlucky.