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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: is there a natural os for lisp
In-Reply-To: natst3@hhipe.uia.ac.be's message of Mon, 21 Aug 1995 10:57:39 GMT
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In article <1995Aug21.105739.9996@reks.uia.ac.be> natst3@hhipe.uia.ac.be
(*Student) writes:

>- Is there a "natural" OS for lisp? Like C-Unix. 

For non-LispM systems, I would say that Lisp probably most naturally went with
PDP-10 hardware and operating systems, especially ITS (MACLISP), TENEX/Tops-20
(MACLISP, INTERLISP), and WAITS (MACLISP, LISP 1.6).

>- Do the lisp-machines use an OS ? Or was it all just part of the lisp-image.
>  If so how did they see multitasking, or filesystems ?

If you can write an OS (that is, understand the concepts involved), you can do
multitasking and filesystems in any language you wish.  If there is a language
that falls naturally together with your hardware, you use it.  Ergo, Lisp as
the systems language on LispMs.

>- Is there on-line information about the older lisp machines and
>  compilers/interpreters ?

A good place to start is

	http://www.inference.com/~rwk/symbolics/
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
