Symbolics Machine

Symbolics was a manufacturer of LispMachines. Still highly collectible, and easy to buy for under $1000USD.

Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum:


Symbolics was a maker of Lisp Machines. They are still selling a software emulation running on DEC Alpha systems. The emulation is called OpenGenera.

The operating system is called GeneraOs. Genera is completely written in Lisp - networking, graphics, device drivers, applications - everything. Some systems are still running on the Internet. The operating system provides for example TCP/IP, DNS client and server, mail client and server, X11, and many more Internet-based services. In fact the company Symbolics was the first organization ever to have a domain name - symbolics.com in 1985. A popular application is CL-HTTP, a web server written in Common Lisp. The author of CL-HTTP is John Mallery from the MIT AI Lab.

There was another operating system for Symbolics' Lisp Machines called Minima. It was developed for real-time systems like AT&T's ATM switches.

Symbolics built their own microprocessor - the Ivory - specially optimized to run Lisp software. Ivory-based machines were for example:

Typical applications for these machines:


CategoryLisp


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