Symbolics and lisp machines.

Discussion of other Lisp dialects (Arc, Clojure, AutoLisp, XLISP, etc.)
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punchcard
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Sep 26, 2014 5:50 pm

Symbolics and lisp machines.

Post by punchcard » Mon Sep 29, 2014 3:25 am

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.

logxor
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue May 27, 2014 10:56 am
Location: Portland, OR

Re: Symbolics and lisp machines.

Post by logxor » Mon Sep 29, 2014 12:14 pm

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.

punchcard
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Sep 26, 2014 5:50 pm

Re: Symbolics and lisp machines.

Post by punchcard » Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:27 pm

Thanks for that, what a great find. Will have a read - nice to see production code examples.

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