| > Or they'd have turned Lisp machines from hardware into a "Lisp machine" OS or IDE/REPL/etc environment for other OSes succeeding. That was a very different business model, very different offering into a different market. One could not move that business model easily, in an existing company to a different market. There were offices, factories, contracts, ... -> costs to get rid of. The thing collapsed, before anything usefully could be scaled down. For example the Symbolics graphics products were very expensive, just the software. A new owner ported it to SGI and Windows NT machines. To be a technically viable product it used a commercial Lisp vendor. It survived a while in that market (modelling/animation/game tools for game studios, animation studios, ...), changed owners again and then died. Lisp (the forbidden word during/after the AI Winter) was a part of the problem, but generally a new business model and customers for it wasn't found/searched. For example TI just closed its AI business and never cared about it from then on. Something like Genera was a huge pile of Lisp code written during 1.5 decades. During its best times the OS and maintenance upgrades were already more expensive than a PC. Applications from the Lisp Machine were ported away. One no longer needed the OS and no longer had the OS. Some applications died, some survived, some died later. Some applications (or the development environment) survived for some years on emulators (-> Interlisp-D was ported to SUNs and PCs, Genera was ported to DEC Alpha). |
Genera's biggest contemporary problem is that John C. Mallery seems to want to just sit on it rather than make it available to people.
Likely future revenues must be close to nil, so why not open source it? Apparently he talked about it years ago but never actually has.
Yes, a lot of the code is really dated, but if it were open source, maybe some people might freshen some of it up.