Talk:Genera (operating system)

Expert needed?
The Genera page sounds confused. Probably written by someone who never used it? --Anon.

Fixed, Rainer Joswig —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joswig (talk • contribs) 20:09, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Should be a disambiguation
This page is target of a large number (300+) of internal links, mostly from plant related articles. It should therefore be made a disambig page. --Imc 09:45, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

History

 * It was closed in 1981. When Symbolics went bankrupt, Genera was rebranded in 1992 and developed for the DEC Alpha processor architecture as OpenGenera; rather than rewrite all (by this point) 1.5 million lines in Common Lisp or another Lisp, Symbolics instead wrote an emulator for Zetalisp, and runs OpenGenera on that. Reportedly, there are efforts to port it to the Macintosh G5.


 * Because Genera was largely a single mass of approximately 10,000 Lisp functions (written in ~500,000 lines of source code) which were called to form the actual programs and which could be called at any time, there is no hard or fast line between the actual IDE and the operating system per se; rather both or either are referred by the name "Genera".

Open Genera is not a ZetaLisp emulator. Open Genera running on an emulation of an Ivory microprocessor and its instruction set. It runs a modified Genera OS on top of it. For the user and developer Genera and Open Genera are looking very similar. Open Genera is just based on an Ivory emulator written in assembly.

I don't know where R. Carelton is getting information about G5. It is unlikely any official development is being done for consumer G5 Mac OSX, though. Back in 1999, Tenedos was aiming to sell Genera to the military, and maybe still trying. They took back all of MIT's aging Symbolics Machines in 1999. Originally the DoD had offered a lot of money to start Symbolics and it seems a plausible scenario that their interest could be revived. Unfortunately the "emulator" written in assembly, but uses Alpha Microcode, basically adding some Lisp Machine instruction set to the Alpha. This was done to speed up the execution of code. Today's 64bit processors (needs to be at least 64bit) are fast enough not to need this, but don't expect a simple plug-in solution to a new architecture.


 * Where do you get your information about 'Microcode' from? I think that's wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joswig (talk • contribs) 12:37, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

More history
This I cut out:


 * "Genera had Genera is still sold commercially as OpenGenera (when Symbolics went bankrupt, Genera was rebranded in 1992) for the DEC Alpha architecture; it was not ported from the Lisp machine architecture, but rather it runs in a virtual machine.


 * Genera was noted for its power, the integration of its tools, and its excellent documentation. Because Genera was largely a single mass of approximately 10,000 Lisp functions which were called to form the actual programs and which could be called at any time, there is no hard or fast line between the actual IDE and the operating system per se''; rather both or either are referred by the name "Genera"."

Which Symbolics went bankrupt when? Make sure you name the right one. Open Genera is not a rebranded Genera. Open Genera is product which includes a virtual Lisp machine for the DEC Alpha running DEC's Unix (or whoever now the owner of DEC's stuff is). Open Genera was under development and released before 'Symbolics' went bankrupt. It was later again sold by the new Symbolics. Sure it was ported from the Lisp machine Genera, but the hardware microprocessor (Ivory) was gone and a virtual machine was developed. Plus the format for the Lisp image changed a bit. The Genera operating system was put on top of the virtual machine (minus lots of stuff plus some other stuff). Plus it had to get access to the Unix filesystem and the network on the DEC Alpha. Plus Open Genera got some layered software (Joshua, Statice, ...) bundled. The whole thing was then called Open Genera. Genera (8.5 was the last version) is still the operating system for the hardware Lisp machines. Open Genera is just the product for the DEC Alpha.


 * It was the second Symbolics that rebranded it, wasn't it? And I'm not too sure whether your point about the virtual machine is all valid- all you seem to say is that the virtual machine was a bit more elaborate than I said in the article, and that some extra stuff was bundled in with the regular Genera OS. --maru (talk) contribs 05:07, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/announcements/19930923-alpha.txt

No, Genera is not a single mass of Lisp functions. Yes, Genera has more than 10000 functions. Many more.


 * It did say "over" 10000 functions- I got that from some of the Symbolics literature (I think I linked it in the External Links). If you have a better number and citation, glad to have it. --maru (talk) contribs 05:07, 6 May 2006 (UTC)


 * funny, I thought you wrote "largely a single mass of approximately 10,000 Lisp functions". Which misleading. Genera is not largely built of approximately 10000 functions. It contains all kinds of stuff. Including thousands of structures, flavors and classes. It is also not a single mass. It is structured by packages, systems, flavors, ...


 * Genera has objects, functions, classes, packages, systems. The software is organized with systems and packages. Packages are the namespaces for the symbols. The systems are organizing the source, data and the compiled files. Genera contains a multitude of systems. You can identify for each functionality to which package and to which system it belongs. Sure, tools can call each other and share data - still you know which tool is which, to which system it belongs, where it is defined, in which version it is loaded and so on. The IDE is made of several systems, applications are delivered as systems, and so on.


 * I think it just doesn't help to put wrong stuff on this Wikipedia thing... Better leave it out and put markers for others to fill in...

The above exchange is interesting. Although the "which Symbolics?" question apparently has meaning for fans and the former employees, I don't think its terribly relevant as each reorganization maintained all intellectual properties and had basic continuity. The confusion about IDE and OS probably has to do with the LISP language and Genera's easily configurable environment. (Some say this was its only real strength: not its power, but flexibility to indulge the most self-indulgent programmers) Although perhaps not a single "mass," it is indeed a single product. In fact, Open Genera CDs were complete with the Symbolics Genera OS, so that Alpha customers and Old Lisp Machine owners received the same disc. I'm not going to restore text, but I think some simple editing would have been a better solution. Cuvtixo 03:31, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

My history
What is written above is largely correct in spirit but is not factually correct. Symbolics was started some time around 1981. Genera is the name of the Lisp operating system (and all its software) which ran on various Lisp machines created by Symbolics. Those lisp machines had their roots in the original MIT CADR lisp machine, but were huge advances beyond what was done at MIT.

One of the last machines was based on a custom CPU chip know as the "Ivory". It was basically a 40 bit word CPU with Lisp primitives. When it became clear there was little future in CPU design for Symbolics they wrote an emulator for the Ivory chip which ran on the DEC Alpha. It was faster than the real Ivory chip and used code tuned for the Alpha architecture. A release of Genera known as "Open Genera" was made to run on this Alpha emulator. The Alpha emulator is often referred to as the "VLM" or virtual lisp machine.

At some point it became clear that there was a dim future for Alpha CPUs. A port of the Alpha emulator to the 64 bit PPC G5 CPU was attempted. It almost worked but suffers from byte order issues (the Alpha ran little endian, the G5 runs big endian).

Then, at some point it became clear that X86_64 CPUs were going to be plentiful and cheap. Because I am lazy, I had an epiphany and wrote some list code to translate the Alpha assembler into simple C statements. Originally I planned to convert the Alpha wholesale but that job looked like a herculean task so I gave into my laziness and took the easy path of generating C. It turns out that the C code (with gcc) generates reasonable X86_64 instruction and the X86_64 VLM runs pretty fast. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jbparker (talk • contribs)


 * Where did you get information that a port to G5 was attempted?  I seriously doubt it, because the Alpha emulator used Alpha MICROCODE, not just Alpha "assembly language".  There was a company called Macsyma, which sold a mathematics software by the same name, with offices at 20 Academy Street Arlington Massachusetts. Originally developed for Symbolics, the company was spun off, then reacquired, then spun off again, nearly went bankrupt, then reacquired AGAIN by the owner (Tenedos) of Symbolics around 1999. No serious development was made on OpenGenera (at least not by full-time programmers) from 1995-2000. I have a copy of OpenGenera from 1999 so I'll confirm what I can. At this time I'm sure there were no G5s, perhaps not even G4s, and MacIvory CPU card only worked on the already aging 68xxx Macintosh Quadras. It might not even have even been clear then that "DEC" Alphas were not going to be resuscitated by Compaq (subsequently bought by HP) but Neither Symbolics or Macsyma had money to pay developers and there was flat out refusal by owners to 'open source' any code. In fact all of the Symbolics machines at MIT were confiscated by the owning company and were stored in Arlington for a short time. Its been a while since then and perhaps something has been attempted, and Alpha is no longer the only 64bit around, but don't hold your breath for a new port of the VLM Cuvtixo 03:00, 5 July 2007 (UTC)


 * No Alpha MICROCODE was used to write the SymbolicsTM VLMTM. Quote from THE SYMBOLICS VIRTUAL LISP MACHINE OR USING THE DEC ALPHA AS A PROGRAMMABLE MICRO-ENGINE, a paper by the VLMTM authors,

"...using the Alpha as a programmable micro-engine and write the emulation of the Lisp Machine instruction set as if we were writing micro-code."
 * Reference [http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=%22open+genera%22+vlm+author%3Ascott.mckay@comcast.net+group%3Acomp.lang.lisp

]
 * Glsowder 20:45, 15 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Neither the link, nor the above account are active, but my source was from Macsyma programmers, not a paper on the internet. I could be wrong, but until a link to actual code shows up, I'll remain skeptical. Cuvtixo 21:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * The VLM does not use Microcode. (http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html). The productized version of Open Genera uses an emulator that uses (generated) Assembler. There was an attempt at a port of the emulator to the G5 - but it was not finished. Currently there is a new port of the VLM to Linux on x86-64. It can run Open Genera. This port uses (generated) C code for the emulator. - RJ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joswig (talk • contribs) 15:03, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

genera on amd64, not fact
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux

I'm certainly not the first one to do so, but here is proof. --Nofxjunkee 22:57, 14 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Definitely not proof. Could be easily manipulated image, and more to the point, it could be a remote login to an Alpha. The window reports Genera running on an alpha workstation, DIS-EMB-HOST. Theoretically I suppose it might be running on a 64-bit Alpha emulation.  Which although impressive, is not as impressive as running natively.  The Symbolics widow also reports no servers running- because they can't ???   And I'm afraid Wikipedia requires published results anyways Cuvtixo 20:38, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * The window reports DEC Alpha, because it is an unchanged Open Genera world on top of a emulator running on Linux. The Open Genera world does not know anything about other ports and will always report to run on a DEC Alpha. The Window reports no servers running, because none have started. Enable services once you log in as usual. FYI, I have been running that emulator on a MacBook Pro using VMware to run a 64bit x86 Linux. Open Genera runs in the 64bit x86 Linux then. -RJ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joswig (talk • contribs) 15:08, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

It's a fact. I just booted cold core on my amd64. just follow the instructions. 85.221.147.47 (talk) 14:55, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Genera and Symbolics Common Lisp
Is there a way of running Symbolics Common Lisp code in general, and Genera in particular, on a minimal conformant Common Lisp implementation? If not, how is it useful to say that Genera is "Common Lisp software"? --Macrakis (talk) 14:01, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Genera is as an operating system a large collection of software. Some of that is written in Common Lisp. Genera provides Common Lisp dialects for Lisp programming. The default dialect is called Symbolics Common Lisp. It offers also facilities to program in strict CLtL-only Common Lisp without Symbolics extensions and changes. Thus Genera supports the development of portable Common Lisp code. Most 'newer' Symbolics software was developed in Symbolics Common Lisp. So, Genera (as an operating system) contains larger bodies of Common Lisp code and is (partly) written in (Extended) Common Lisp. Some parts of Genera have been rewritten to portable Common Lisp. For example the GUI toolkit 'Dynamic Windows' has been developed into the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM). CLIM is a part of Genera. It allows the development of portable user interfaces in Common Lisp. CLIM itself is written in Common Lisp. Whether Genera runs somewhere else is of no importance. Allegro Common Lisp is also written in Common Lisp, but also does not run on another Common Lisp.
 * For me the criteria to add it to the Category 'Common Lisp Software' is: it contains a large amount of software that is written in Common Lisp. This is especially interesting since Genera comes with a lot of source code that is available for the user to study.
 * - RJ

What? Open source?
From the article: "Genera is also sold by Symbolics as Open Genera, which runs Genera on computers based on an Alpha processor using Tru64 UNIX. This software is available as proprietary software. However, older versions are available as free software." Is that just referring to the MIT Lisp Machine code mentioned later in the article, or is there something more specifically "Open Genera" that is available under an open source license? - Apotheon (talk) 07:07, 11 November 2012 (UTC)