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That helps, thank you. Based on what I've seen with Smalltalk, and playing around with the online Interlisp environment [0], I was under the impression an under

by uticus 3y ago

That helps, thank you. Based on what I've seen with Smalltalk, and playing around with the online Interlisp environment [0], I was under the impression an underlying OS was not a necessity [1]. [0] https://online.interlisp.org/main https://online.interlisp.org/main [1] Part of my confusion may stem from ideas like presented by Chuck Moore in Masterminds of Programming by Biancuzzi: "Operating systems are dauntingly complex and totally unnecessary. It’s a brilliant thing that Bill Gates has done in selling the world on the notion of operating systems. It’s probably the greatest con game the world has ever seen. An operating system does absolutely nothing for you. As long as you had something—a subroutine called disk driver, a subroutine called some kind of communication support, in the modern world, it doesn’t do anything else. In fact, Windows spends a lot of time with overlays and disk management all [sic] stuff like that which are irrelevant. You’ve got gigabyte disks; you’ve got megabyte RAMs. The world has changed in a way that renders the operating system unnecessary. What about device support? Chuck: You have a subroutine for each device. That’s a library, not an operating system. Call the ones you need or load the ones you need."

lispm 3y ago
http://lispm.de/genera-concepts http://lispm.de/genera-concepts
- uticus 3y ago
  Fascinating. > Genera is your whole environment; it encompasses what you normally think of as an operating system as well as everything else - system commands and all other activities. From where you look at it, there is no "top-level" controller or exec.
  - lispm 3y ago
    But it has a sophisticated process scheduler, several garbage collectors, complex memory management, various network stacks, implementations of file systems (local and remote), virtual memory paging, software installer, printer scheduler, namespace server for configuration of networked resources (users, networks, printers, hosts, ...), mail server and client, ... It's not that it has "a subroutine" for a disk, but actually very extensive support for disks and file systems on disk. It's just that everything runs in one spared memory space, incl. all applications. Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment.
    - uticus 3y ago
      > Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment. I wonder. I know this is safely in imagination world, but if I were to have a system like this connected to the Internet, and there were others with similar systems also connected to the Internet, I would guess requirements above and beyond what is already provided would be: 1) security / sandboxing 2) ease of sharing code I’m pretty fuzzy on how #2 would happen. I spent so much time with Git these days it’s hard to imagine anything else. #1 is actually less hard for me to imagine: “The key to Genera's intelligence is the sharing of knowledge and information among all activities.” I can imagine the routines responsible for this being extended to handle sandboxing. But then again I have a pretty good imagination, so maybe in reality this is actually the more difficult part to implement.
      - lispm 3y ago
        At that time one put stuff on a remote machine acting as a file server. One would centrally configure which stuff is where. The Lisp Machine could also act as a file server. It then knew users, files directories, servers, access control lists, file versions, etc. To a non-Lisp Machine one used NFS, the Lisp Machine had its own remote file protocol called NFILE. One could share software also via tar files or via its one distribution format. Networked object stores were also being developed. But that was all before encrypted network connections were used... we are talking about the 80s when TCP/IP just became a thing. Today one would need to upgrade the network stack of a Lisp Machine to support something like TLS or use it only over VPNs...
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    >From where you look at it, there is no "top-level" controller or exec. ”Real systems have no top." Read that quote somewhere quite a while ago. :) Searched just now and found: https://softwarequotes.com/author/bertrand-meyer https://softwarequotes.com/author/bertrand-meyer which has the quote.
    - lispm 3y ago
      They have several.
      - fuzztester 3y ago
        Yes, I did understand the quote. It was not by me, but I could have said "no single top", if I had thought if it earlier :)
gumby 3y ago
Interlisp was developed at BBN on the PDP-10 under the TENEX operating system. Danny Bobrow had previously been at MIT and worked on MACLISP running on PDP-10s running the ITS OS. So that mode was and is perfectly normal. When Danny went to PARC they started working on a port of Interlisp to the D machine hardware. The model adopted was that of smalltalk: a hermetic environment running on the bare iron, with everything (drivers, network stack etc) written in lisp. One big difference from the MIT world was that smalltalk and Interlisp were built around working in a world and checkpointing the entire machine state, rather than loading files into a base image. PARC also had a lot of network-only RPC services (mail, filesystem, printing, etc) so each environment had its own implementation of talking to these services, and all its own UX. We’re talking late 70s here, some of it more sophisticated than what you can get today.
- gumby 3y ago
  I should add that the D machines had writable control stores so these language environments (Interlisp-D, SmallTalk, and Cedar/Mesa) each had custom microcode. I wrote some microcode for InterLisp-D back when I was 20.

by uticus 3y ago

lispm 3y ago

http://lispm.de/genera-concepts http://lispm.de/genera-concepts

uticus 3y ago
Fascinating. > Genera is your whole environment; it encompasses what you normally think of as an operating system as well as everything else - system commands and all other activities. From where you look at it, there is no "top-level" controller or exec.
- lispm 3y ago
  But it has a sophisticated process scheduler, several garbage collectors, complex memory management, various network stacks, implementations of file systems (local and remote), virtual memory paging, software installer, printer scheduler, namespace server for configuration of networked resources (users, networks, printers, hosts, ...), mail server and client, ... It's not that it has "a subroutine" for a disk, but actually very extensive support for disks and file systems on disk. It's just that everything runs in one spared memory space, incl. all applications. Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment.
  - uticus 3y ago
    > Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment. I wonder. I know this is safely in imagination world, but if I were to have a system like this connected to the Internet, and there were others with similar systems also connected to the Internet, I would guess requirements above and beyond what is already provided would be: 1) security / sandboxing 2) ease of sharing code I’m pretty fuzzy on how #2 would happen. I spent so much time with Git these days it’s hard to imagine anything else. #1 is actually less hard for me to imagine: “The key to Genera's intelligence is the sharing of knowledge and information among all activities.” I can imagine the routines responsible for this being extended to handle sandboxing. But then again I have a pretty good imagination, so maybe in reality this is actually the more difficult part to implement.
    - lispm 3y ago
      At that time one put stuff on a remote machine acting as a file server. One would centrally configure which stuff is where. The Lisp Machine could also act as a file server. It then knew users, files directories, servers, access control lists, file versions, etc. To a non-Lisp Machine one used NFS, the Lisp Machine had its own remote file protocol called NFILE. One could share software also via tar files or via its one distribution format. Networked object stores were also being developed. But that was all before encrypted network connections were used... we are talking about the 80s when TCP/IP just became a thing. Today one would need to upgrade the network stack of a Lisp Machine to support something like TLS or use it only over VPNs...
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >From where you look at it, there is no "top-level" controller or exec. ”Real systems have no top." Read that quote somewhere quite a while ago. :) Searched just now and found: https://softwarequotes.com/author/bertrand-meyer https://softwarequotes.com/author/bertrand-meyer which has the quote.
  - lispm 3y ago
    They have several.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      Yes, I did understand the quote. It was not by me, but I could have said "no single top", if I had thought if it earlier :)

gumby 3y ago

Interlisp was developed at BBN on the PDP-10 under the TENEX operating system. Danny Bobrow had previously been at MIT and worked on MACLISP running on PDP-10s running the ITS OS. So that mode was and is perfectly normal. When Danny went to PARC they started working on a port of Interlisp to the D machine hardware. The model adopted was that of smalltalk: a hermetic environment running on the bare iron, with everything (drivers, network stack etc) written in lisp. One big difference from the MIT world was that smalltalk and Interlisp were built around working in a world and checkpointing the entire machine state, rather than loading files into a base image. PARC also had a lot of network-only RPC services (mail, filesystem, printing, etc) so each environment had its own implementation of talking to these services, and all its own UX. We’re talking late 70s here, some of it more sophisticated than what you can get today.

gumby 3y ago
I should add that the D machines had writable control stores so these language environments (Interlisp-D, SmallTalk, and Cedar/Mesa) each had custom microcode. I wrote some microcode for InterLisp-D back when I was 20.