The Unix Haters' Handbook

[Josh Dersch]

I think it'd certainly be possible.  Symbolics did a "port" of Genera to 
the Alpha (ran under Tru64 unix) called OpenGenera; Brad Parker's done 
an amd64-linux port of that port (which I don't know the legal status 
of).  See http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux.  
(I've tried it, it's /bleeding fast/ on modern PC hardware.  It's also 
buggy at the moment :)).

There are other "lisp directly on the hardware" OSes for modern hardware 
but I haven't looked into them very deeply yet.

Josh

Liam Proven wrote:
> On 07/04/2008, Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>   
>>  I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of all the operating systems
>>  that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot."
>>     
>
> Sounds like a paraphrase of Winston Churchill:
>
> "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
> except all the others that have been tried."
>
>   
>>  User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at the command line
>>  is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
>>  even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
>>  for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
>>  (command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
>>  for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
>>  documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
>>  whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
>>  window, for the most part.  This may be less of an issue for the
>>  user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
>>     
>
> I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in these days of
> high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
> implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
> of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
> whatever?
>
>