Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Hello everyone,

I am trying to get a Symbolics MacIvory II LISP machine up and running, but have encountered a very frustrating roadblock. Seeing as, oddly, this was the top forum that showed up in my Google searches (and I have browsed it before because I think SGIs are awesome machines from my childhood), I was hoping maybe someone here would be able to point me in the right direction.

Quick background : I have a Symbolics MacIvory II machine residing in an Apple Macintosh Quadra 650. I wanted to install A/UX on the system, so naturally this meant wiping out the entire drive and starting from scratch. Figuring I could always reinstall Genera easily, I stupidly reformatted the entire system without making a backup copy of the Genera 8.3 LISPM partition file.

Here's the problem :

Genera REQUIRES installation from either a CDROM drive or a tape drive. The CDROM is a hybrid - it contains a Mac HFS partition for installation and a standard ISO9660 partition that houses the actual Genera files.

Installing the MacIvory software from the CD works fine. The hardware is detected, and the FEP (similar to UEFI) on the machine launches. A very basic partition is then created with a couple of files, but then the LISP machine tries to access the CDROM and retrieve Genera from it to continue the installation.

It is at this point that the installation fails with an error, and Google is telling me it's because the CDROM drive I am using is too new. Apparently it will only install using a single-speed drive - well surprise surprise, I have one: an AppleCD SC Plus. However, this drive seems to be completely gone, as it rejects any CDs I load into it via caddy. I have tried cleaning the lens and recapping the PCB to no avail.

Further Googling has indicated that if I can obtain a working FEP/Genera partition from someone else, I can use that partition to bootstrap the LISP machine and then proceed with the installation by accessing the contents of the CD which have been copied to the local Macintosh hard drive.

*I am stuck with a very basic FEP filesystem that does not allow me to access the local host's Macintosh hard drive because certain required files are not present (they are on the CD, which the LISP machine cannot access).

*I am the legal owner of the Symbolics Genera CDROM; that is not an issue.

My request : I need a stripped-down Genera partition with the necessary .flod files for accessing the local host's partition. If anyone happens to have a working MacIvory Genera machine or can get me in contact with someone who does, it would be greatly appreciated.


I am not asking for pirated software, as I already own the software and have an official copy in my hands. The problem is that the medium on which the software resides is useless and can't be used to get my machine going. Thanks for reading.

Hi,

I've got Genera 8.3 on a MacIvory III - however currently it's not installed because the hard drive died. I've got a CF2SCSI adapter and want to use this to install Genera 8.3 again. This time I'm going to write notes of the complete install (from empty disk, installing OS 7.5, updating stuff, installing Genera, first steps like restoring Genera documentation, etc.). Because this is a rather long story, it's still sitting on my desk—yeah, call me lazy.

Anyway, I use a Plextor Plexwriter in an external SCSI enclosure (PX-R412Ci). I had no problems to install from this device. And it's definitely not a 1X SCSI CD-ROM. So I would say that this "your CDROM is too new" advise is not really true. But you can read it in many places. I even asked David K. Schmidt when I bought the Genera 8.3 CDs if I need a 1X drive. His reply:

These CDs are reprints of the originals. These CDs can be loaded by any speed CD drive that works with your Quadra 700. ISO images are available at the same cost.

I also tried with an Apple PowerCD. This is a 1X drive and the results were kinda unreliable. Sometimes it did work, sometimes the install of Genera 8.3 failed.


Perhaps you want to try the latest installer? Try this URL and download the archive listed under 3. Newer Ivory life support software.

http://www.mcmax.info/symbolics/download.html

I had no trouble to install from this software. If everything else fails, perhaps you could post a screenshot of the error you receive during the installation.


Edit: I used FWB CDROM-Toolkit 3.02d as a driver for the Plextor. Maybe this driver helps to make the installer read the Genera CD correctly.

The CD-ROM drive doesn't need to be recognized by the Mac OS (except just as a normal SCSI target) in order to use it for Ivory BOL. I used an old Chinon.

Thank you both for the quick and useful replies. What a great forum!

Tomvos, I had come across that link once before, but didn't even think about trying it out - however, that's what worked! After completely wiping out the old install and files, I reinstalled using the newer life support software (in MacIvoryArchive.sea.hqx ) and it worked!

I can't tell you how relieved I am that the info I found in my searches was wrong.

All the best, and good luck if you decide to get your MacIvory III system going again. I have a decent collection of vintage systems, and my interest in them waxes and wanes. I'd like to add an SGI to the collection some day.

Allow me a question, why would you run Genera on a mac as opposed to OpenGenera (Genera 8.4) either on alpha or snap4/snap5; please educate me, wouldn't this be a preferable configuration?

Because you have a Mac LISP machine board (a fun vintage-computing rarity) and you want to do something with it?

Does OpenGenera run on the 164LX?

OpenGenera 2.0 is based on Genera 8.5, not 8.4.
The emulated environment does not implement the Symbolics native file system. There are also other missing features.

The present market value of an Ivory machine like the OP's is around $5000, which seems to me to be the last word on whether it is "a preferable configuration".

ClassicHasClass wrote: Does OpenGenera run on the 164LX?

I believe it would run on anything that can run Digital Unix 4.0 (including emulators running Digital Unix 4.0). There are hacks to run it on linux/x86 or x86_64 and perhaps other platforms. There are videos floating around of people running it on modern laptops, hence, certainly not alpha.

Can MacIvory genera binaries run on OpenGenera?

No idea, I'm just looking for interesting things to do with this new toy of mine.

I wish someone had documented how to configure opengenera, it's not really trivial.

Well, I've just joined the MacIvory party (Genera 8.3 pre-installed on a MacIvory 3 with 8MW). And by God I paid for it, too.

Any suggestions from the other MacIvory mafia for when this machine, which should be plated gold for that amount of cash, arrives? I'm going to immediately image the hard disk before I do anything else since I don't have install media.

nice, looking forward to see how that works for you.

IT BETTER WORK DAMN WELL OR I JUST PAID A SHETLOAD OF MONEY FOR A DOORSTOP.

I'm not 100% positive, but I think that the hard disk will have either a directory of hidden files (representing FEP files), or an additional partition that contains a FEP file system. I last used a MacIvory many years ago, so I don't remember which it was. There is also software on the Mac HFS side called "Breath of Life" and "Life Support".

Symbolics had a "different" way of doing file management, that had multiple layers (like an OSI model for files!)
At the lowest level there was a "simple" file system for the FEP that had coarsely allocated files in a flat (no directories) namespace. Their sizes cannot change. These would be boot drivers and scripts, virtual memory areas, "worlds" or "bands" which are full system images, and LMFS areas. The LMFS was the high-level filesystem with journalling, versioning, soft delete, etc. It could use multiple FEP files on multiple drives to store a single directory tree. Think of AdvFS domains.

On the Ivory there was no FEP, but the idea of a simple executive for booting was kept, and the processor runs in a "FEP Mode" when it starts. The dedicated workstations used 1280-byte sectors, to match the VM page size, but the embedded cards like the UX and MacIvory used a compromise to fit into the host's native block size, at the expense of some wasted space.

There is indeed an FEP file system on a non-HFS partition ("FEP0") in the screenshot I have. However, I'll just be immediately plugging the drive into my NetBSD Q605 and dd'ing off /dev/sd0c, so that should get all the partitions plus the partition map. I imaged my NetBSD IIci the same way.

Incidentially, the same guy I bought this from appears to be dumping a whole bunch of fully configured Macs with various MacIvories (2s and 3s) on eBay. I count four, including the IIfx with a MacIvory 2 he just listed. The least expensive so far was $4K.

The lusers' guide:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttga ... _Guide.pdf

I was going to say that the FEP0: is not really a partition name, Genera refers to it as a "Host slot". Host can be physical or logical, there is a complex table of mappings. So it's like a label that tells the system how to access a file, and even how to parse the pathname. From the manual (page 908) it looks like there is a dedicated partition (or several), but I wasn't 100% sure. I do know that on the UX400 ("Solstice") there is no separate partition.

71271.1417 (a CompuServe ID) is the guy who took over the sales and support operation when Symbolics was liquidated. He's been selling manuals and hardware on eBay for 17 years or so. Prices have been going up: I'm not sure that he's going to get $2500 for a MacIvory II, but it's possible. The MacIvory II is about a third the speed of the III, both from the slower Ivory chip and the slow main memory over the NuBus.

(edited from "a quarter the speed" as I remembered, to "a third" which is straight from the horse's mouth)

mia wrote: Can MacIvory genera binaries run on OpenGenera?

Actually, how does Genera do binaries? Is it actual machine code for the LISP-machine CPU, or do they take the LISP thing and run with it and just store programs as lists of cons cells and values? That could be pretty portable, assuming compatible word sizes and such, though you'd need some way to relocate and link it with whatever the system has in the way of a global set of primitives/system calls.

"Binaries" could mean two different things in Lisp systems in general, not just Lisp Machines.
The first is what are called fasl files, or compiled files. These are a compiled representation of a lisp program file. What this means is that it contains the same objects (symbols, functions, and constants) as the source in a compiled form. Usually there is a map of the symbols that are used, and instructions to recreate the constants and functions when the fasl is loaded. Whether this is really a binary format is kind of irrelevant since all that matters is recreating the objects. You could just print out the compiled functions in octal, it would still be fasl.
The second is what is called a world or a band. That's a large file that contains an entire virtual memory image. For acceptable performance this does need to be a bit-for-bit copy of the memory in the machine at the time the world is saved. Some systems copy the world eagerly into memory and others use a lazy copy-on-write scheme. You can also build worlds that are incremental on other worlds, although only Symbolics seems to have done this.

If the above isn't clear enough, there is no relocation or linking involved in compiled files. Functions are visible by being bound in the environment, whether interpreted or compiled makes no difference.

The MacIvory wasn't the first Lisp Machine processor that fit inside a Macintosh, that would be the Texas Instruments MicroExplorer from 5 months earlier. It was actually faster, due to its onboard memory, and was even sold through Apple sales channels (with a Mac II chassis customized to say "Microexplorer"). Today they seem especially rare, although the only other person I know who has one got it for the same as I paid, $5. The problem is that the software from TI is not nearly as interesting.