Symbolics Lisp: Using the DEC Alpha as a Programmable Micro-Engine (1993) [pdf]
pt.withington.org
pt.withington.org
AFAIK, the unofficial x86 port of OpenGenera is an emulator for Alpha which emulates the Lisp machine, and all together it’s still much faster.
I had the pleasure of figuring out how to get X keyboard codes from a Linux box into the emulated Genera. What a pain! As far as I know, the “world building” code has been lost so it’s not even possible to bootstrap a Genera system from scratch. (You can dump worlds from memory of an existing Genera system though.) I think this limitation made it difficult to change some hard coded constants, like the size of the communication buffer which was essentially shared memory between the running Genera system and the host operating system.
I wish this software could be preserved properly, instead of sitting under a rain cloud of uncertain legal standing. I don’t remember exactly how the story goes, but Symbolics software fell into the hands of Andrew Topping, who died, and whose estate went to John Mallery (at one time famous for writing a Lisp HTTP web server than ran the White House website), and he had held onto the IP rights since, with no indication of selling or releasing it.
(Common Lisp historians / Symbolics enthusiasts, please correct any errors I’ve made. :))
I also have a 1U rackmount DEC Alpha that I will give free to anybody in the Bay Area. I intended to use it to run Open Genera but ended up purchasing a Mac Ivory instead.
You can run the official Open Genera emulator in an Alpha/Tru64 UNIX emulator on top of an Intel CPU.
But the 'unofficial' port is actually a direct port of the Open Genera emulator to 64bit x86.
alphavm_free which was removed by the creator - probably because he wanted to increase sales of his basic offering - can still be found on the Internet however.
Can't that be solved by ordering PCBs, your favorite switches, and custom key caps? BTW, has nobody 3D scanned those keycaps on their newer keyboards? The older model seems pretty standard sculpted spherical top ones.
> AFAIK, the unofficial x86 port of OpenGenera is an emulator for Alpha which emulates the Lisp machine, and all together it’s still much faster.
Is there a place this unofficial port can be seen?
We can try at least to characterize the action (force x displacement curve, contact point, audible feedback) of the switches to find something similar. As for the keycaps, 3D printing will only get better. We may need to wait a couple years, but we'll have them.
For the keycaps, there is probably enough interest (given the amount of replica sets) to just cast a run of something extremely close to the originals with the usual mold injection techniques.
With a special USB-Adapter one can use them on computers with USB.
The website of one of the authors is
Just ask him. :-)
I find it strange that the author would not publish the paper on his website but would submit it to random people that ask for it on email.
I don't know whether he will submit it to random people who ask for it. But he will probably be able to answer whether a non-abstract version exists. :-)