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emacs the Operating system is both the idea of the LISP machine and the situation that since it is extremely extensible, you can use it as a shell, for irc or mail, read pdf and view images, listen to music and do anything that doesn't require a modern web browser, or video player.

For me that was the situation for a while, nothing but Firefox and emacs. I even used it for IM and Twitter. All I needed was for it to render the web and I could ditch anything but it.

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No, it really isn't. A Lisp OS (like Genera) is about extensibility down toward bare metal, not up towards applications. As you point out, if all you want to do is live your whole computing life inside of Emacs and hacking about with Lisp, people have been doing that for years (decades) without an underlying Lisp OS. Having a Lisp OS is being able to live inside that environment and being able to say things like "I'm going to add a new queuing scheme to networking" or "I wonder what happens if I change how the GC subsystem works" and the ability to do that is in the environment, in Lisp, all the way down.

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