15 Oct
2008
15 Oct
'08
4:11 p.m.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Alexandre Lag?e-Jacques
<alexandre.laguejacques at gmail.com> wrote:
Even aside from that, I'm not convinced. I think Symbolics Genera is
arguably more programmer-friendly, though that could just be because I
find Lisp a much nicer language than C. (There may be even better
OSes; that's just what I have personal experience with.)
This message pertains to der Mouse's comment... Out of idle curiosity I
looked up Symbolics Genera and the story of the Lisp machines...
Fascinating! Any idea of how to get one's hands on such a machine? eBay is
not forthcoming although they have been mentioned in some old messages on
cctalk.
- Alex
I can help a bit here. Symbolics as a company still exists, although
it only has 1 employee (David Schmidt, an extremely nice guy) who
maintains working Symbolics machines everywhere. When he has
inventory, he offers the machines for sale. See
http://www.symbolics.com. They don't often show up on EBay (and can
be somewhat tricky to ship). I ended up buying my Symbolics from
David directly, driving down to Los Angeles to meet him and cart the
machine home.
Symbolics' Genera is an amazing environment.
Mark
It's a
UNIX box, man. The most (programmer-)friendly OS in
existence. At least for even moderately technical people.
There are UNIX-compatible people and non-UNIX-compatible people (cf
Unix Hater's Handbook).