Lisp Machines
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
The Lisp Machines were easily the best environments ever created for developing in Lisp, but the companies that produced them died out quite a while ago (Dan Weinreb has described some of the reasons for this). They weren’t just great tools for writing Lisp—Genera is one of the best environments for writing code that’s been created for any language. Squeak is the only thing I’ve seen that comes close.
Although the current legal status of the IP around the Lisp Machines is unclear, you can now get your hands on the source, and run the environment pretty easily on a 64-bit Linux installation (or even OS X + VMWare + Linux)—credit for the Linux port goes to Brad Parker.
Setting it up isn’t exactly a point-and-click operation, and guides are non-existent (I think)—so here’s what I did to get it up and running on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu 7.10 x86-64 (this may clobber other things; I’m assuming a dedicated Ubuntu installation):
rtorrent og.torrent
tar xfj opengenera2.tar.bz2
curl -O http://www.unlambda.com/download/genera/snap4.tar.gz
tar xfz snap4.tar.gz
apt-get install xorg nfs-common nfs-user-server inetutils-inetd
cat <<EOF > /etc/inetd.conf
daytime stream tcp nowait root internal
daytime dgram udp wait root internal
time stream tcp nowait root internal
time dgram udp wait root internal
EOF
/etc/init.d/inetutils-inetd restart
hostname genera-host
cat <<EOF > /etc/hosts
10.0.0.2 genera
10.0.0.1 genera-host
EOF
echo “/ genera(rw,no_root_squash)” > /etc/exports
/etc/init.d/nfs-user-server restart
cd snap4
cat <<EOF > .VLM
genera.network: 10.0.0.2; mask=255.255.255.0; gateway=10.0.0.1
genera.virtualMemory: 2048
genera.world: Genera-8-5.vlod
genera.debugger: VLM_debugger
genera.coldLoad.geometry: 800×600
EOF
SDIR=/var/lib/symbolics
mkdir $SDIR
# you could just link below, but I want keep a clean copy somewhere
cp -R ../og2/sys.sct $SDIR
mkdir $SDIR/rel-8-5
ln -s $SDIR/sys.sct $SDIR/rel-8-5/sys.sct
./genera
Once you’re in the Genera environment, evaluate the following:
Namespace server name: genera
Unix Host Name: genera-host
Login
Login: Lisp-Machine
To test things out, you can evaluate something like Edit Definition read-from-string, which should pull the source for read-from-string from the Linux host over NFS. If you edit the definition, load it with M-x Compile Changed Definitions. If it all works, congratulations; you now have a fully-functioning Genera 8.5 environment.
Genera itself is excellently documented (just fire up the Document Examiner), but the emulator has very sparse docs. I’ll post some more soon with further details about day-to-day use—keybindings, etc.