About a year ago or so I was bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and since then I've become very interested in Lisp machines, particularly Symbolics machines running the Genera operating system. I'm in my late 20's and thus I wasn't around when Lisp machines were in their heyday; however, I believe that it's sad how the proverbial baby (Lisp OSes such as Genera) was thrown out with the bathwater (Lisp machines) when Lisp machines were gradually replaced with Unix workstations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would have been nice had Genera or another Lisp OS been ported to the x86 instead of Lisp users having to switch to Unix. Sometimes I even dream of an alternative history where RMS embarked on a GNU-licensed Lisp operating system instead of GNU.
I wonder what type of legal challenges are inherent in making Genera open source? My limited understanding of the situation is that the IP of Symbolics is held up in an odd manner due to the dissolution of the company, but I don't know all of the details. It would be nice if Genera were open source and ported to the x86-64. Barring that, a free software clone of Genera would be nice, but it may be a substantial implementation effort.
John C. Mallery owns the IP of Symbolics right now, as far as I know. Someone mentioned that he had plans to open source it, but it was a long time ago.
With my limited (or next to none) knowledge of software copyrights, I am wondering how come the IP of a company ends up belonging to a single person. Is that the case?
Genera was using more than 32 bits in each word so the Alpha was the only available target at the time for a software emulation of the system.
It would have been easier to create a port of the LMI or TI systems to a workstation or 386 PC, they only ever used a 32 bit word. TI would have been the obvious candidate as they were building 68020 systems that used the same case as the Explorer. Add a simple external MMU to the 68020 and a native compiler and it would be reasonably fast.
I guess that LMI didn't have enough staff to look at something like this back then. There is a new Lambda emulator if anyone wants to play with it [1].
Xerox did port their software to workstations and I believe it is still sold by Venue.
I learned OO programming on a Symbolics 3600 using ZetaLisp+Flavors around 1987. It was a cool system (when it did not have hardware issues). I used a Symbolics to implement perhaps the first simulation of kinematic self-replicating robots (and accidentally invented robot cannibals -- another story as a cautionary tale...)
Genera may be interesting to play with for fun and learning -- but Smalltalk is much more of a living thing with ongoing communities around Squeak, Pharo, Amber, and more.
I liked Genera but I loved Smalltalk (first with ObjectWorks/VisualWorks and then other variants). After using those two environments, pretty much everything since has been disappointing and felt like big steps backward.
(Well, the Newton OS was cool too including with "Soups"... Sad Apple killed the Newton OS just as the MP2100 with the StrongARM was good enough hardware to run it well... I also liked HyperCard which Apple also killed... And I also learned Forth before any of those and it was cool within its niche...)
Still, when I squint, I can kind of see a huge distributed Smalltalk-ish/Lisp-ish/Newton-ish/HyperCard-ish/Forth-ish system spread across all the networked browsers out there processing JavaScript/HTML/CSS. So, that's why I do JavaScript stuff right now -- and try to build an thinking/coding environment for the web inspired by those sorts of ideals (and others); some work in progress: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7
But using JavaScript seems more likely to succeed somehow than Python all things considered (warts and all) --
especially when you consider JavaScript's ubiquity. I figured if Dan Ingalls could swallow his pride and use JavaScript for the Lively Kernel, I could give it a try too (but approaching it from a different direction of more native DOM interactions via Mithril.js and Tachyons).
I wonder what type of legal challenges are inherent in making Genera open source? My limited understanding of the situation is that the IP of Symbolics is held up in an odd manner due to the dissolution of the company, but I don't know all of the details. It would be nice if Genera were open source and ported to the x86-64. Barring that, a free software clone of Genera would be nice, but it may be a substantial implementation effort.