6 ms·

Open in the "closed" sense. The legal status of anything from Symbolics is a minefield. Even this "portable Genera" might be of dubious legality... "Open" he

Open in the "closed" sense. The legal status of anything from Symbolics is a minefield. Even this "portable Genera" might be of dubious legality... "Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain.

hayley-patton 2y ago
"We changed the name to OTP." "Three of the trendiest names we could think of. Open. Telecom. Platform." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ
Y_Y 2y ago
I'm sure if they weren't incentivised by the certainty of creating a legal minefield in the future then this technology would never have been created and we'd be sitting at home banging sticks together.
- amszmidt 2y ago
  Most of this ”technology” was created at the MIT AI Labs, Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same). The MIT version of the Lisp Machine is free software without any legal conundrums. So there you go …
  - lispm 2y ago
    > rest of the system was essentially the same not true
    - amszmidt 2y ago
      Very true, try doing a M-x Source Compare. Genera is backwards compatible with System 99. And any differences are trivial.
      - lispm 2y ago
        I'm looking at a Symbolics file system. Where do I find Dynamic Windows in System 99? Common Lisp? CLOS? The Document Examiner? X11? NFS?
        amszmidt 2y ago
        Nobody was saying that Genera didn't do anything novel, Dynamic Windows being one, and the Dynamic Listner being another. Overall, the guts are essentially the same, ZMacs, Zmail (also not part of the base System), Flavors, and anything else in the base layer -- to the point that you can compare all of the files that get stuffed into the cold load image without much effort. System 99 has support for Common Lisp. System 301 will hopefully have better support than Genera (seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway) at that. The Document Examiner is a separate system (and LMI did it differently, with Gateway), and not part of the base System. X11, and NFS likewise. So listing a bunch of orthogonal systems isn't really what was being discussed.
        lispm 2y ago
        The core Symbolics SYSTEM system I see here is version 501.51. It consists of a bunch of other systems like SI, Embedding, L-Bin, Tables, Scheduler, Netboot, Common Lisp, SCT, Garbage Collector, Flavor, Error System, Language Tools, Network, Lisp Compiler, Bitblt, Fonts, FS, Bin, Time, TV, Presentation Substrate, CP, Dynamic Windows, Debugger, I Linker, Fep-FS, ... I don't see much of that in System 99 from MIT. Stuff like X11 and NFS is also not random stuff. Open Genera uses it for its console and its files. > seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway Well enough that it is able to run a lot of its software written in Common Lisp. It's able to run stuff like PCL, ASDF, ITERATE, ... System 99 is from 1984 (?), Symbolics started in 81/82. Open Genera appeared 1992/93. You are ignoring a full decade of development. Earlier: > Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same). I would guess that less than 20% of the core SYSTEM is essentially the same (but often quite a bit enhanced). For the rest of the software, I would think it's even less. Which is not surprising, since System 99 did not support the 3600 systems, the G-Machines, the I-machines (XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, NXP1000, MacIvory 1/2/3, ...), Open Genera, ..., because all that was developed later by Symbolics.
    - Y_Y 2y ago
      I usually decry this sort of response and as virtually useless and not letting to fruitful discussion. However I have to commend lispm and amszmidt on having a fascinating (if tense) discussion on the history of Genera and its variants.
- eschaton 2y ago
  The Symbolics intellectual property wasn't a legal minefield until the past decade and change, where it was acquired from Andrew Topping's estate by a longtime MIT Lisp guy who has been a complete idiot for not opening it up to the world. However, he only actually owns it if Andrew Topping actually paid the Symbolics bankruptcy executor for it in full. (Not doing so would entirely fit Topping's character, based on his criminal rap sheet.) If Topping didn't fully pay for it, then it still belongs to whoever or whatever the successor of the Symbolics bankruptcy executor is; I think that was ABN AMRO. Good luck finding any of that out!
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Are you talking about John Mallory? I imagine someone has already tried to figure this out, but it's indeed not easy to find much online. It even appears there's ongoing development, but in some secretive fashion: https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553491209727096 https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553491209727096 (by the same dude who wrote TFA). Could anyone more knowledgeable provide firther direction?
fsckboy 2y ago
>"Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain. nah. what you are describing is Open in the present day, like OpenAI. back in the day it meant "open standards, allowing cooperation between secretive competitors". IBM and Digital could both implement to an open standard instead of their traditional proprietary so their devices would interoperate. This type of openness is what Microsoft liked to "embrace, extend, extinguish", meaning "we'll get kudos joining the interoperating consortium, we'll look cutting edge by adding features which would make us not actually interoperate but are useful so people will adopt them, then we will have killed off this threat to our monopoly" in that same period of time, open source started to be called that because what was open was the source.
- anthk 2y ago
  Back in the day there was ITS, Maclisp and Emacs on top of TECO.
  - lispm 2y ago
    That was gone at a time when Lisp Machines were commercialized (81/82). Emacs there was called Zmacs and was written in Lisp. Maclisp was replaced by Lisp Machine Lisp / ZetaLisp / Common Lisp. UNIX was then a thing. Open Genera in the early 90s then ran on OSF/1 UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 , renamed to Digital UNIX) on DEC Alpha. OSF meant Open Software Foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation ), a group propagating "open standards" for UNIX.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Curiously, GNU was born in that era, to give the Unix users the freedom from ITS, Maclisp, Emacs and the rest of the projects from MIT. Instead of having slow-ish boot times in a Lisp machine, GNU's plan was to put several memory-protected concurrent interpreters under Unix, giving the user far more power by default with GNU/Hurd against a common Unix users. WIth namespaces, for instance, you could forget about suid and/or needing group perms to mount a device or access different media and soundcards.

hayley-patton 2y ago

"We changed the name to OTP." "Three of the trendiest names we could think of. Open. Telecom. Platform." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ

Y_Y 2y ago

I'm sure if they weren't incentivised by the certainty of creating a legal minefield in the future then this technology would never have been created and we'd be sitting at home banging sticks together.

amszmidt 2y ago
Most of this ”technology” was created at the MIT AI Labs, Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same). The MIT version of the Lisp Machine is free software without any legal conundrums. So there you go …
- lispm 2y ago
  > rest of the system was essentially the same not true
  - amszmidt 2y ago
    Very true, try doing a M-x Source Compare. Genera is backwards compatible with System 99. And any differences are trivial.
    - lispm 2y ago
      I'm looking at a Symbolics file system. Where do I find Dynamic Windows in System 99? Common Lisp? CLOS? The Document Examiner? X11? NFS?
      - amszmidt 2y ago
        Nobody was saying that Genera didn't do anything novel, Dynamic Windows being one, and the Dynamic Listner being another. Overall, the guts are essentially the same, ZMacs, Zmail (also not part of the base System), Flavors, and anything else in the base layer -- to the point that you can compare all of the files that get stuffed into the cold load image without much effort. System 99 has support for Common Lisp. System 301 will hopefully have better support than Genera (seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway) at that. The Document Examiner is a separate system (and LMI did it differently, with Gateway), and not part of the base System. X11, and NFS likewise. So listing a bunch of orthogonal systems isn't really what was being discussed.
        lispm 2y ago
        The core Symbolics SYSTEM system I see here is version 501.51. It consists of a bunch of other systems like SI, Embedding, L-Bin, Tables, Scheduler, Netboot, Common Lisp, SCT, Garbage Collector, Flavor, Error System, Language Tools, Network, Lisp Compiler, Bitblt, Fonts, FS, Bin, Time, TV, Presentation Substrate, CP, Dynamic Windows, Debugger, I Linker, Fep-FS, ... I don't see much of that in System 99 from MIT. Stuff like X11 and NFS is also not random stuff. Open Genera uses it for its console and its files. > seeing that it doesn't really support CL very well anyway Well enough that it is able to run a lot of its software written in Common Lisp. It's able to run stuff like PCL, ASDF, ITERATE, ... System 99 is from 1984 (?), Symbolics started in 81/82. Open Genera appeared 1992/93. You are ignoring a full decade of development. Earlier: > Genera did a few cool things but in the grand scheme of things it is essentially not much (the Dynamic Listener probably being the most interesting thing, the rest of the system was essentially the same). I would guess that less than 20% of the core SYSTEM is essentially the same (but often quite a bit enhanced). For the rest of the software, I would think it's even less. Which is not surprising, since System 99 did not support the 3600 systems, the G-Machines, the I-machines (XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, NXP1000, MacIvory 1/2/3, ...), Open Genera, ..., because all that was developed later by Symbolics.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    I usually decry this sort of response and as virtually useless and not letting to fruitful discussion. However I have to commend lispm and amszmidt on having a fascinating (if tense) discussion on the history of Genera and its variants.
eschaton 2y ago
The Symbolics intellectual property wasn't a legal minefield until the past decade and change, where it was acquired from Andrew Topping's estate by a longtime MIT Lisp guy who has been a complete idiot for not opening it up to the world. However, he only actually owns it if Andrew Topping actually paid the Symbolics bankruptcy executor for it in full. (Not doing so would entirely fit Topping's character, based on his criminal rap sheet.) If Topping didn't fully pay for it, then it still belongs to whoever or whatever the successor of the Symbolics bankruptcy executor is; I think that was ABN AMRO. Good luck finding any of that out!
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Are you talking about John Mallory? I imagine someone has already tried to figure this out, but it's indeed not easy to find much online. It even appears there's ongoing development, but in some secretive fashion: https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553491209727096 https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/109553491209727096 (by the same dude who wrote TFA). Could anyone more knowledgeable provide firther direction?

fsckboy 2y ago

>"Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain. nah. what you are describing is Open in the present day, like OpenAI. back in the day it meant "open standards, allowing cooperation between secretive competitors". IBM and Digital could both implement to an open standard instead of their traditional proprietary so their devices would interoperate. This type of openness is what Microsoft liked to "embrace, extend, extinguish", meaning "we'll get kudos joining the interoperating consortium, we'll look cutting edge by adding features which would make us not actually interoperate but are useful so people will adopt them, then we will have killed off this threat to our monopoly" in that same period of time, open source started to be called that because what was open was the source.

anthk 2y ago
Back in the day there was ITS, Maclisp and Emacs on top of TECO.
- lispm 2y ago
  That was gone at a time when Lisp Machines were commercialized (81/82). Emacs there was called Zmacs and was written in Lisp. Maclisp was replaced by Lisp Machine Lisp / ZetaLisp / Common Lisp. UNIX was then a thing. Open Genera in the early 90s then ran on OSF/1 UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 , renamed to Digital UNIX) on DEC Alpha. OSF meant Open Software Foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation ), a group propagating "open standards" for UNIX.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Curiously, GNU was born in that era, to give the Unix users the freedom from ITS, Maclisp, Emacs and the rest of the projects from MIT. Instead of having slow-ish boot times in a Lisp machine, GNU's plan was to put several memory-protected concurrent interpreters under Unix, giving the user far more power by default with GNU/Hurd against a common Unix users. WIth namespaces, for instance, you could forget about suid and/or needing group perms to mount a device or access different media and soundcards.