MIT's Lisp Machine Operating System
The Lisp Machine operating system was written in Lisp Machine Lisp. The Lisp Machine was a one-user workstation initially targeted at software developers for artificial intelligence projects. The Lisp Machine 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. The Lisp Machine operating system provided (among others):
- code for a Frontend Processor
- a way to boot the operating system
- virtual memory management
- garbage collection
- drivers for the hardware (mouse, keyboard, screen, disk, …)
- an interpreter and a native code compiler for Lisp Machine Lisp
- an object system (Flavors)
- a window system and a window manager
- a local file system
- support for the CHAOS network
- an Emacs-like Editor named Zmacs
- a mail program named Zmail
- a Lisp listener
- a debugger
This was already a complete operating system and development environment for a Lisp-based one-user operating system.
The MIT Lisp Machine operating system has been developed from the middle 1970s to the early 1980s.
In 2006 the source code for this Lisp Machine operating system from MIT was released as open source.
Read more about this topic: Genera (operating System)
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