5 ms·
From a historical interest perspective, I would love to see some Symbolics simulators. From a productivity and ergonomics perspective, I don't think chip level
by jdboyd 5y ago
From a historical interest perspective, I would love to see some Symbolics simulators.
From a productivity and ergonomics perspective, I don't think chip level simulation would be the way two go. First, Genera has been ported forward to new system. First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. There is a project called VLM to let you run OpenGenera on x86 or ARM and I would imagine it is many times faster still. Also, to my understanding, OpenGenera can still be purchased from symbolics-dks.com for a heft fee.
Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world.
I would love to see a more modern system like OpenGenera. I also would love to see Symbolics style keyboards be made and possibly upgraded with things like better keyswitches and USB. That should be doable for someone who wants to make a custom layout, circuit board for that layout, and keycaps but based on QMK compatible hardware.
- bitwize 5y ago> First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. Open Genera was soft emulation of the Symbolics Ivory hardware on Alpha. I believe they didn't even do anything fancy like dynarec; which is why it was such a doddle to port it (from binaries?!) to amd64. > Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world. A modern developer running Visual Studio Code has most of the features the Lisp Machines had, and then some. Edit and continue can even be had under Java and C#.
- diskzero 5y agoAre you saying a modern developer running Lisp has most of the same features of a Lisp Machine? If not, what language(s) are you referring to?
- _19qg 5y agoPortable Genera on a current MacBook is about 80 times faster than the last hardware-based Genera.
- mietek 5y agoIf only mere mortals could get hold of it…
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThere is the possibility of ending the snobbery of the entitled by going this way: [1] https://interlisp.org/ https://interlisp.org/ & [2] https://github.com/interlisp https://github.com/interlisp Thereby uplifting this environment to current systems without layers upon layers of emulation, fully and legally open-sourced.
- lispm 5y agoThis is also an emulator. Interlisp uses an emulator written in C and output goes to X11. Open Genera and Portable Genera use an emulator written in assembler (running on DEC Alpha, X86-64 and ARM64 - for the CPU emulation) and output goes to X11.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoAs far as I understood it, at first people used the Tru64 emulated Open Genera under Alpha emulation running on some older Ubuntu running on X86-64. That was years ago. Maybe that got some refinements. Is the portable Genera directly retargeted to X86-64 now? And does it matter if it's practically unavailable? edit: OFC i know Interlisp-D/Medley is also an emulation. But directly retargeted, and legally open source. And not 'production ready', for now. But seems to be only a matter of time.
- lispm 5y ago> at first people used used the Tru64 emulated Open Genera People I know used it on original DEC Alphas and on Alpha emulators running under Windows. The new version, called Portable Genera, has three assembler Ivory emulator versions: DEC Alpha, Intel x86-64 and ARM64. > And does it matter if it's practically unavailable? There are a few users.