Re: Not numbered backups anymore - LISP OS instead?

It does not make sense for anyone to use Genera for production today, 
because it's an unsupported platform that exists only in an emulator for 
retro-hobbyist or historical purposes. There is no way to even 
distribute a Genera-based program, since the end user would need the 
entire Lisp Machine. It was never a delivery system in that respect.

(Well, the price curve could theoretically have enabled it to compete in 
the mainstream market with Intel. And today there would be no problem if 
someone wanted re-invent a tagged architecture, GC-supporting, "Lisp" 
processor). But of course that's not what happened, and Open Genera was 
the capitulation to that reality. Timing is everything.

Symbolics did have delivery solutions for ordinary computers, including 
PCs. You could use Genera to develop your program, and (assuming it 
didn't rely on Genera-specific functionality) deliver it on a suitable 
platform. One of the Symbolics delivery platforms was CLOE (Common Lisp 
Operating Environment) for PCs. Of course, if you were sticking to 
Common Lisp, you could deliver on any other conventional Common Lisp 
platform as well.

You can still do that today. Some people might find it productive to use 
Genera as a CL development platform, and deliver on Lispworks (or Franz 
or SBCL or CCL or any of the other systems). I am not really 
recommending that, for a variety of reasons, but I can imagine that 
someone somewhere might like it.

Open Genera, originally designed for the kick-ass Alpha CPU, was. a 
failure, as it did not save Symbolics. It was the Hail Mary as the 
company was almost entirely shut down. (The hardware track, a very fast 
RISC chip, was cancelled the day it was to tape out.) There was almost 
nothing left of the company by that time -- just a few people.

Regarding real-time work on the Lisp Machine...
LispMs were indeed used for real-time control systems, and there was at 
least one company that made a LispM-based platform for things like 
factory automation. Controlling things like cold rolling steel 
mills.  LispMs were also used for controlling robotic arms and stuff, of 
course.

I at one time worked for another company, where we developed a 
distributed high-speed real-time solution for applications like gravity 
wave detectors; this was a lot more demanding than industrial control 
applications and in our model, the LispM was the central control, 
coordination, and high-speed disk data store, talking to very high 
frequency controllers running an RTOS (I forget which one, maybe based 
on VxWorks?).

Genera was also used by American Express for transaction processing. At 
one point, all Amex green card transactions were accepted/declined/etc 
and processed by a tiny bank of Symbolics Lisp Machines. This was the AI 
of the era. The machines were hidden in essentially a closet, next to 
the big iron IBM computers in the main room. They wanted to give the 
impression that it was the IBM mainframes doing the work, and they 
didn't want to admit that there was any AI (and certainly not that weird 
Lisp stuff) actually doing it.

One of the last projects I worked on ("Minima") at Symbolics was a new 
real-time operating system for embedded control applications. It was 
based on Genera and the hardware was an Ivory chip, but had different 
scheduling and paging systems, a different network implementation, 
various other changes, no development environment, and was headless. The 
first customer was AT&T, who wanted to use it as their next-generation 
ESS (switch controller, processing all the calls and driving the switch 
fabric). That was just before Symbolics went tits up with daisies.

So, yes, Lisp Machines (and Genera) could be used for real-time 
applications.
But one would not do that today, for many reasons, even if you developed 
your real-time app on an emulated Lisp Machine. What are you going to 
do, emulate all the external hardware, too? You're certainly not gong to 
want to be calling the hardware interface routines in the Lisp Machine 
operating system!

At one time, Lisp Machines were all over the place.
Sometimes hidden, either for "secret sauce" or for embarrassment reasons.

These days, conventional CPUs and their onboard or onbus auxiliary 
processors are a zillion times faster than what we had in 1980 or 1990. 
And they can run Lisp.





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