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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
ZWEI, TV and SI makes up the majority of the base system which is far more than "20%" percent, which is ignoring EH, WINDOW, and anything else that is essentially processor agnostic.
The target processor is not that important from the users point of view, to the point that Lambda and CADR shared the exact same source code, and microcode. The Explorer I was essentially a Lambda. Much was "feature" protected with #+/#- to the point where many of the systems worked on Genera as well.
So that seems at par with the CPU architectures that Symbolics made, which is "just" a change to the compiler .. and not the overall system .. which is what was being discussed. But yes, Symbolics did design hardware done by Symbolics and made sure it worked on their system .. not sure what your point is other than giving an incorrect view of history and what Symbolics actually did to the Lisp Machine system parts (Symbolics work was much more interesting when it came to other systems like the 3D stuff and what not).
ZWEI is no longer in the base system. EH does not exist, a Window system does not exist. Dynamic Windows is in the base system.
> The target processor is not that important from the users point of view
It's important for the operating system and the processor was used for very different machine hardware: standalone workstations, headless systems, embedded in a Mac, embedded in a SUN, embedded in a network switch, ...
> Lambda and CADR shared the exact same source code, and microcode.
But not the 3600, which was a 36 bit architecture and not the Ivory, which was a 40 bit microprocessor. A lot of the core routines were different on a 3600 and an Ivory machine. The VLM was even different, running on a 64bit microprocessor, implementing the emulator in C and assembler. There is low-level functionality which has two or three different implementations.
The Ivory machines could be very different from a LAMBDA and a CADR, for example as an embedded CPU in a very different host machine (Mac & SUN). That had a lot of consequences for the operating system.
> ZWEI is no longer in the base system. EH does not exist, a Window system does not exist. Dynamic Windows is in the base system.
Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)…
System 200 ran in the CADR and 3600. Using the same code base, with different microcode. With just bunch of #+ and #-.
And no, the target is not that important that it makes up “80% of the system”.
Your going into tangents and constantly raising neg things not being discussed, we aren’t talking about the host architecture but about the Lisp Machine system which is mostly agnostic of the target CPU. And between those two, Genera and the MIT system, are essentially the same when it comes to the base layer. To the point you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work.
Genera 9 (which started development just a few years ago going of a system that hadn’t been touched for 30 years and under dubious legal situation) is essentially Genera 8.5 with several fixes.
Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system. And that is one of the reasons why feature and code are so similar.
> Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)…
Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff.
The error handler is not the same anymore.
> you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work
I think that's pure fantasy.
> Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system.
I don't think that was a goal, given that the MIT system was not relevant anymore and the vendors all had their own forks. TI converted much of the old code to Common Lisp with a translator. Symbolics wrote most new code in Common Lisp.
Without an extensive implementation of Common Lisp incl. CLOS, basically nothing runs on the old system.
The times of a few conditional reader macros was soon over.
Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?
> Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff.
Plenty of people still do, e.g. on a Ivory or 36xx machines.
> I think that's pure fantasy.
I ported the Dynamic Listener (with large parts of DW) a bunch of years back to run on MIT System 78.
> ... MIT system was not relevant anymore ...
I realise you like to raise Symbolics to the skies, but to say that the MIT system, which then was continued by LMI was "not relevant" is just making up history. Both systems where still heavily used until the demise of Symbolics, and LMI and portability was absolutely one goal since breaking peoples code was not considered nice.
> Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?
No idea, LOOP on the MIT Lisp Machine is the standard Loop, feel free to port it though -- patches welcome as they say.
SI, Scheduler, GC, Flavor, EH, Compiler, TV, etc all date back to before Symbolics entered the picture. And if you don't see that in System 99 .. then you must not be looking very hard since they are explicitly mentioned there. You mention a bunch of things that are also _not_ part of Genera, specifically bunch of Ivory stuff -- which is just the processor target.
> 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, ...
No it is not. You are thinking of Portable Genera.
> System 99 is from 1984 (?), Symbolics started in 81/82. Open Genera appeared 1992/93. You are ignoring a full decade of development.
System 99.32 is from 1987, which continued via LMI into System 130. Genera, or before when it got forked, is from 1978 when it got forked from System 78 or there about being re-branded into System 200. All three (four if you count TI -- which did quite more in renaming things making it hard to follow) with parallel development going on from there into the early 1990s.
Genera is a Lisp Machine system based on the work done at MIT, where most of the guts still the same. To the point that how you rebootstrap the system is the same, how the core areas look work, how the scheduler works, how the windowing system works, how flavours works, etc.
Open Genera did very little on top of Genera at that, mostly targeting and making it work on the Ivory. You are purposefully conflating Portable Genera, Open Genera and Genera.
I have literally started a VLM (Portable Genera 2.0.6) with a Genera 9.0.6 world. In the "herald" the software says that it is running Genera 9.0.6. You can claim "You are purposefully conflating Portable Genera, Open Genera and Genera.", but I'm actually looking at it now and you don't. Please don't tell me this BS, when I'm right now reading the screen in front of me.
> You mention a bunch of things that are also _not_ part of Genera
Of course they are. I have the thing right in front of me, running. I'm typing to it. I'm looking at the system definition of SYSTEM 501. On a live running Genera 9 on a VLM. If I would look at my MacIvory running Genera 8 it also would not look much too different.
Stuff like EH has been long superseded. The Scheduler has been redesigned & rewritten. TV has mostly been superseded by Dynamic Windows. The Garbage Collector has been extended, by new GC variants.
> Open Genera did very little on top of Genera at that, mostly targeting and making it work on the Ivory.
Open Genera does not work on the Ivory processor. It's a Virtual Lisp Machine.
> Genera is a Lisp Machine system based on the work done at MIT, where most of the guts still the same. To the point that how you rebootstrap the system is the same, how the core areas look work, how the scheduler works, how the windowing system works, how flavours works, etc.
The Scheduler works different (the old scheduler polled, the new own is event driven), the window system is now Dynamic Windows, Flavors has been updated to New Flavors & the new CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System), ...
you know you don't need tell everyone how you have palter's vlm to look at rel-8-5's sysdcl which has been leaked and hosted on public sites since forever. for example https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/symbolics/sys.sct/sys/sy... rel9's sysdcl is not substantially different anyway, the list of module components is the same.
ams's hyperbolic perhaps point is that genera is significantly SYSTEM, that symbolics contribution is a kind of obvious extension of the grand vision that was already there in its totality and potential in the MIT's work. I think it's a valid argument, which I don't think can be resolved just by listing names of subsystems.
for example you can't just say "oh they replaced tv and window with dynamic windows", because dw uses both tv and legacy, for lack of better term, window. if you look at the flavor definition of basic dynamic-window it uses tv:stream-mixin tv:graphics-mixin and tv:minimum-window. and tv minimum-window is a venerable SYSTEM flavor. not to mention that other systems (like zwei) still use tv window directly. how thick a layer dynamic-window is on top of tv? answering that question require systems level knowledge and investigation.
> you know you don't need tell everyone how you have palter's vlm to look at rel-8-5's sysdcl which has been leaked and hosted on public sites since forever
I'm not sure what you are talking about. It's not related to what I wrote.
> how thick a layer dynamic-window is on top of tv? answering that question require systems level knowledge and investigation.
Dynamic Windows introduced a new UI look and feel, different from the old "static windows". DW has new APIs even for reimplementations of old UI features from TV , like the new drawing interface in the graphics package, which replaces the old TV flavor messages, with generic functions. It has also a lot of new features, like the presentation system. Later applications typically will use the new DW interfaces and new features. Both DW and TC are documented in "Programming the User Interface", with DW providing much of the high-level application window features, described in the first chapters.
There is another version of it, in another implementation, which is CLIM, which is then based on CLOS. Even later applications were thought to use the CLIM interfaces, to be able to write portable user interfaces, able to run on various other Lisp systems. Both DW and CLIM are substantially different from TV. Neither DW, nor CLIM are in the MIT software.
> Other symbolics extensions are of similar nature.
Sure, and those extensions can run on the MIT Lisp Machine.
But we are taking about the base system. Not extensions. And why one can take those systems and for the most part just run them in another system is cause they are so similar!
It is possible, I did it. It isn't hard (mostly boring work with bunch of shims).
The reason is as I said before, Genera is layers on top of an existing system that hasn't changed (much).
E.g, DW is of flavours on top of TV (with lots and lots of extra additions .. additions are easy to handle -- after all the DW code is like 1M of Lisp from 1989 or whatever).
The Dynamic Listener was more complicated to rip out, but mostly work. The hard part, at which I gave up, was adding all the presentations for objects and other such.
Can't talk about the rest, but some spelunking led me to finding that TV was "legacy" component in later Genera options, working properly only on the main console and, due to significant emulation work, on MacIvory through RPC to host Mac.
DW/CLIM treated TV as one possible driver, if not sidestepped it, the problem was that some software (iirc mainly related to some S-Graphics products) had some hardcoded TV dependencies from earlier versions - it's mentioned as part of the porting plans for OpenGenera, because OpenGenera has no working TV subsystem at all, because TV didn't work over X11.
>Open Genera did very little on top of Genera at that, mostly targeting and making it work on the Ivory.
Ivory support was implemented in Genera 7.3. Open Genera added the virtual machine to run on DEC Alpha hardware, it was Genera 8.3 + VLM, upgraded to Genera 8.5 with Open Genera 2.0.
Additionally, VLM is otherwise "ivory rev. 5" which is not compatible at compiled code level with ivory rev. 0-4 which where the physical ivories. Small differences in few places including IIRC in page sizes.
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.
