Not numbered backups anymore - LISP OS instead?

The term LMFS (Lisp Machine File System) intrigued me, and I did a bit of a Googling around ...

Was amazed to find a whole OS based on LISP and still alive seemingly (not sure if sustainable or on life support though ... perhaps Windows applications keeps Symbolics afloat):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)
http://symbolics-dks.com/

I wonder if there is any user of it here .. ?

Best,
Ugis

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com)
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2026 11:24
To: Christopher Stacy <[email protected]>
Cc: Pascal Bourguignon <[email protected]>; Tim Bradshaw <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Numbered backups

What I meant is that people romanticise how great those OSs were.  They were better in many (not all) ways than PDP-11 era Unix, but they also ran on machines which cost large multiples of what a PDP-11 did: it's like saying a Bristol 406 was a better car than an Austin Mini.  Not to mention that PDP-11 era Unix is about as closely related to modern systems as Mercury-Redstone is to the USS Enterprise.

And that's just the start of it: those systems have become the Lost Cause for a group of people.  And that's toxic.

Not to mention it's really funny when people talk about 'the Unix filesystem': I mean, which one of the several hundred are we talking about here?  The one that was a version control system, that one?  Because that one had versions.  One of the probably several whose backend is git?  Those have versions as well.

Back on topic I wish people would just stop about pathnames and packages in CL.  Yes, you might occasionally need a tiny portability shim you write once for pathnames.  On the other hand I have a system which does hairy pathname searching to look for modules which has no shims at all, and has run in every CL implementation I've tried it in.  I use it every day.

In particular people shouldn't complain unless they come up with a properly documented proposal together with a conforming implementation of that proposL for at least one CL which is claimed to be better.

OK, enough.

--tin

> On 13 Feb 2026, at 03:47, Christopher Stacy (as cstacy at dtpq dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 2/12/26 7:16 PM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>> Almost yes.  I mean, obviously actually no because those systems have been excessively romanticised since they died (I only used twenex while they were alive), but it should be possible for filesystems to provide this functionality.
>> 
>> --tim
> 
> The Lisp Machine file system (LMFS) was the pinnacle of those; it captured the features of the older ones I mentioned and improved upon them a bit. I am not sure what you mean by "romanticized". I guess you mean that some people complain that Unix (and the variants we're using today) and Windows have far more primitive -- I would say "impoverished" -- file systems? It doesn't seem like romanticism to me; it just seems like being stuck in a shitty situation, after having been in a better one. Perhaps you disagree. I would be genuinely curious: Why do you think the present situation is better?

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