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Concept
Genera (operating system)
Summary
Genera is a commercial operating system and integrated development environment for Lisp machines created by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI), and Texas Instruments (TI). Genera was also sold by Symbolics as Open Genera, which runs Genera on computers based on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha processor using Tru64 UNIX. In 2021 a new version was released as Portable Genera which runs on DEC Alpha, Tru64 UNIX, x86-64 and Arm64 Linux, x86-64 and Apple Silicon M Series macOS. It is released and licensed as proprietary software.
Genera is an example of an object-oriented operating system based on the programming language Lisp.
Genera supports incremental and interactive development of complex software using a mix of programming styles with extensive support for object-oriented programming.
The Lisp Machine operating system was written in Lisp Machine Lisp. It was a one-user workstation initially targeted at software developers for artificial intelligence (AI) projects. The system had a large bitmap screen, a mouse, a keyboard, a network interface, a disk drive, and slots for expansion. The operating system was supporting this hardware and it provided (among others):
code for a frontend processor
means to boot the operating system
virtual memory management
garbage collection
interface to various hardware: mouse, keyboard, bitmap frame buffer, disk, printer, network interface
an interpreter and a native code compiler for Lisp Machine Lisp
an object system: Flavors
a graphical user interface (GUI) window system and window manager
a local
support for the Chaosnet (CHAOS) network
an Emacs-like Editor named Zmacs
a mail program named Zmail
a Lisp listener
a debugger
This was already a complete one-user Lisp-based operating system and development environment.
The MIT Lisp machine operating system was developed from the middle 1970s to the early 1980s.
Official source
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