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Symbolics and lisp machines.

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 3:25 am
by punchcard
Hi,

I found the manuals on bitsavers for the lisp OS, but what I am curious about is where the source code is for these machines? I was always curious how the bofins at symbolics managed to get lisp running on the metal - how the system programming worked ect..

For low hanging fruit stuff - it seems like Clisp is pretty straight forward to manipulate the shell ect.. would be a nice project to see how much of a vanila debian install could be done in lisp. I would imagine this was a fairly common project idea so I was a bit suprised there is little information about how to go about this.

Re: Symbolics and lisp machines.

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 12:14 pm
by logxor
There's an old thread about the Symbolics Genera OS. The Symbolics stuff is proprietary, though there's source code and hardware design for the MIT CADR Lisp machine available for browsing. It's a lot of archaic and low-level code, but some of it does make for interesting reading.

Re: Symbolics and lisp machines.

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:27 pm
by punchcard
Thanks for that, what a great find. Will have a read - nice to see production code examples.