[simonbrooke]

There certainly was a lot of mystique about Genera; I only got to play with a Symbolics machine once. But, although it was the very top end of the US East Coast Lisp machines, it was just a US East Coast Lisp machine. You edited files, you did not edit in core. You edited with a text editor, you did not edit with a structure editor. You did not have the vast range of graphical code inspection and exploration tools that we had on Interlisp (or if you did they didn't show them off), and the break inspector was just as crude and clunky as it is on a modern Common Lisp system.

My understanding is that the Symbolics machines were a lot faster than our Dandelions and Daybreaks (I never got to play with a Dorado, either...), but... I honestly don't believe they were in the same class.

Mind you, the other Lisp machine of that era that I really lusted after, the Connection Machine, I never got to play with at all, although there was one being used for something very hush-hush and defence related in one of the labs some of our machines were in.

Interlisp was about fifty years ahead of modern software development systems; Genera was forty years behind (which is fair enough, it was forty years ago).

[pamoroso]

Didn't Genera also provide advanced features such as the presentation facility at the base of CLIM that came later?

[lispm]

There was a bunch of advanced things in Genera: the error handling system (-> Condition System), Flavors, CLOS, an object-oriented generic networking substrate, an ephemeral garbage collector (which vastly improved the usability of a machine with large virtual memory), support for embedding the OS into other hardware / OS combinations (like a Mac or a SUN), support for programing in C/Pascal/Fortran/Ada with a language sensitive IDE, support for color/video/3d/..., versioned source code management for files, ... Important also and mostly unique: things like the error handling system and the presentation-based UIMS was widely used in the operating system and the applications. When did you last see an operating system which was using something like the condition system (with integrated debugger and restarts) as its main error handling and gives that to the end-user? When was your TCP/IP stack written in Flavors/CLOS and could be debugged/extended on the fly? There was also a version of Genera, called Minima, that ran on embedded Lisp Machine boards.