Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum | Hacker News Reader

Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

ifis.uni-luebeck.de

52 pointsghosthamlet14 comments

A few weeks ago I picked up an old copy of "LISP Lore: A Guide to Programming the LISP Machine," at Goodwill of all places. It was definitely an interesting platform.

I bought a used copy at great expense a few years ago.. only for it to show up on the Internet Archive as an ebook a few months later.

My company still uses a Symbolics Lisp machine! Granted, they use it as a coffee table in the lobby.

Do you have any photos of this table you could share?

A friend of mine worked for a company in College Station, TX. They still had a few Symbolics boxes around, wouldn't get rid of them because the owner had paid so much for them new.. but they were, yeah, being used as stands for the coffee machine, tables, etc.

Repository for various lisp machine related projects: http://www.unlambda.com/

Resurrecting the MIT CADR: https://lm-3.github.io/

Is there any modern project to produce something like the Lisp machine OS?

only half joking but... emacs?

I remember seeing this link here within the last month. It's called PilOS that runs picolisp. Here's the link: https://picolisp.com/wiki/?PilOS

Mezzano: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

also: dear symbolics, just open source it already..

A lot of the IP is tied up in probate and the guy who owns the rights to most of it died a couple of years ago.

There's an emulator and ways to run it on a 64-bit *nix system if you know where to look..

There's a lot of effort "behind the scenes" to save/preserve/document as much of the stuff as possible.

Andrew Topping died a dozen years ago. Surely the IP is out of probate by now?

In 2012 Kalman Reti, the last Symbolics hardware and software engineer, mentioned that John C. Mallery (of CL-HTTP fame) acquired the IP from the probate and was thinking about open-sourcing everything. That was a while ago, so I guess the new owner changed his mind or he is too busy with his cybersecurity business. I wonder if there is a way to convince him to do the right thing.

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