Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Anyone on here ever had/worked on one? Besides SGI's, it once upon a time was my dream box. But although in comparison the former were price-wise a bargain, I never could afford the latter. And just having a copy of the "Lisp Machine Manual" is not really an adequate substitute

I ran xlisp on my compaq Portable 386 but it seems to be really cranky about running anything.
I really want to get a LISP interpreter running on my PDP-11 though.

No, I had a bad experience with LISP in the 1970s and didn't look at it again until the last couple of years. Neat stuff (now).

I hear the company is still in business and if you have the cash you can get a system and help from guys who actually know something.

Isn't there LISP on trailing-edge?

pentium: you could try Texas Instruments PC-Scheme, it should work on a 386. Pretty nice IDE for the time (mid 80s).

I had access to a Symbolics machine during school and kept some of the manuals. Like some other systems that thrived and perished before the WWW, much of the information available today is incomplete or wrong. For a while I archived information about several obscure lisp machines designed in France, Japan, and Norway, but bit rot ate the linked pages and it was too time consuming to fix everything.

Indeed, I'd Texas Instruments PC-Scheme [conforming to the Revised3 Report] running on my IBM PS-Half. In fact, I still (!) have the very same version on my HP 200LX - for sure, not a speed demon, but probably the most portable device capable of running Lisp-like stuff ever

I'm still looking for a working MacIvory card. I don't really have the space (or room on my electricity bill) for a full-on Symbolics workstation, but this fits perfectly with my classic Mac fetish, and I have a number of NuBus Macs that will accommodate one.

EVERYBODY wants a lisp card (or a transputer for that matter). They have been in high demand for years yet nobody who owns them seems to actually use them for anything.
At the prices people keep asking it's far easier to use a software interpreter than hold out for a Nubus/ISA/EISA card.

CLISP [not to be confused with CLIPS] is a good Common Lisp implementation which can be compiled under Irix/MipsPro C without problems. Of course, it's no Lisp Machine where everything from the operating system to the UI is written in (Zeta)Lisp. Still, it's worth the effort.

On EBay a couple months ago, a MacIvory II (a NuBus card that runs at half the speed of the latest and best hardware Symbolics released) sold for $360. That's a sight better than the last one to appear, four years ago, that was being offered at $1200 with a IIfx.

in 2005 I learned that an XL1201 was sold via an email exchange for $5000. That is the desktop version that cannot support color graphics; by comparison I have heard of an XL1200 selling for $10,000. The only machine to appear on EBay that year, an XL1201 bundled with a UX400 VME board inside a Sun 3/140 went for the paltry price of $510.

The machines attract high prices because of their rarity. Although roughly 20,000 computers (including NuBus and VME boards) were manufactured by Symbolics, very few survive. A more economical option is to use the hardware emulator they developed for Alpha AXP workstations after their Chapter 11. Since it uses the same embedded computer architecture as the MacIvory and UX systems, the user experience is similar.

Assignats ! more assignats !! We need more assignats !!

got back from my oral surgery (2 wisdom tooth and 2 molar, all removed one time) damn it was an awefull experience.. lesson learn, always listen to your doc and dentist

anyway, because of this post, i really got into LISP and the LISP machine and while resting for 5 days i stumbled on this site: http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=11

his idea really interesting, tempt me to buy a FPGA kit but geez spent 1400USD for the surgery ouch.. now its my wallet that hurts hehe
his idea of a "sane" computer is really cool! hehe any comments?

I will note that lisp machines (like Forth and some other topics) are a magnet for dreamers and crackpots.
Often these projects get started with only negative goals: they know emphatically what they do not want, but have only a vague idea of steps to achieve a coherent vision. Backwards dependencies are also a symptom: for instance, declaring that "conventional architectures" are "hostile" to high-level languages, then proposing to implement a new architecture for which no software exists. This is a type of tunnel vision. Another is the conviction of originality; surely my ideas are iconoclastic and new, there is nothing to learn from academic papers!

this.

hahaha then thanks for waking me up then
it almost suck my soul hehe

Within the context of the present thread, is this to be construed as flaming?

While I don't consider myself a crackpot, I'd rather dream of perusing a Symbolics or running Lisp on my SGI boxes than struggle, e.g., with a C-machine

I'm simply giving a warning. Do you really mean that you've never come across that type on the internet?
I suppose I may be unfortunate in having long subscribed to certain usenet groups and seen the assortment of mental defectives that plague them periodically. I don't mean that dreaming is necessarily bad, but you can tell that for some, the idea of "dream machines" (pace ted nelson) is rather more poetic feeling than technical concept. Ideals, if that's what they become, have a way of being unshakeable by facts and no real progress can be made.

I'm not entirely convinced that there is such a thing as a "C-machine", since C has been made to work on Crays and Symbolics too as long as the code is truly portable. It's the operating systems (that old research area that rob pike declared dead) that create dependencies on C compilers and their ills. At any rate, the architectures of the world vary in too many dimensions to pretend that they break down along the same lines as HLLs.

Morning guys

Just curious in anyones approach on this case: if you are assigned to design and implement a Lisp machine, which approach is more ideal?
1. Design the hardware to accept and execute the bytecode generated by todays Lisp compilers?
2. Design the hardware to accept your own optimized instruction sets base from your own designed Lisp compiler/interpreter?
3. Design the hardware to interpret the Lisp syntax?

Someone sold an input device especially designed for those machines ... I bet these are hard to come by now

I have (2) MacIvory boards - a 2 and 3. The 2 is in a IIfx and the 3 is in a Quadra 950.

The IIfx is the more interesting as it has a NuVista card - which is directly accessed by the MacIvory and has the full S-Graphics software suite - which created "Stanley and Stella", one of the first CGI animated films, as well as the whale in free Willy, the klingon bridge in star trek 3, etc. - it was the first standard high end 3d system - before SGI really got into the game - like 1986-1991 or so. It actually lived on as Nichimen Miria ( which did Gollem in LoTR, amongst others ). Genera ( the symbolics OS ) also had the fist hypertext document creation system built into an OS ( it had 100s of MB of docs in the late 80s - all hypertext ). Very ahead of it's time.

There is a copy of Open Genera ( a virtual Symbolics that was released post HW business and mutant version that actually runs on OS X and Linux instead of Tru64/Alpha ) floating around the internet. It's easy enough to find with google.

I first started using Symbolics systems 17 years ago at American Express while we where working on heuristic learning fraud detection system ( which is still used in various forms by a lot more then AMEX today - and still mostly lisp or lisp cross compiled to C ). We would develop on the Symbolics ( be it MacIvory or actual XL1200s or later Open Genera on Alpha ) as there was nothing better for our dev needs. It's really hard to explain how efficient the environment was for development. Macintosh Common Lisp got close in some ways, and Light Table ( the Open Source IDE for Clojure, etc. ) steals a lot - but honestly - it's still no comparison. I wish Rainer Joswig's site still had the videos of Genera up so people could get a first hand idea of how it works.

Anyway, we would then develop on Symbolics and then deploy on SPARC or PA-RISC after after compiling under Lucid Common Lisp. I know they had Symbolics gear or Open Genera was still in use for development as of 2002.

The MacIvory systems them selves are very interesting to use - I still use mine from time to time for algorithmic work under Lisp/Scheme or S-Graphics fun. It's definitely a different experience then any other development system i've used. These days, I usually access it via a remote X session from one of my Macs or my Tezro. Nothing like Irix with Symbolics Genera in a window

Sorry for the rambly nature of the post.. I get excited talking about symbolics..