Genera

[kmike]

Originally Posted by thirdm

Reading the release notes I love the number of things that have been removed, e.g. support for extra ciphers for passwd and the somewhat large complicated web and mail servers I will never use as a mere hobbyist. In my fantasies I see myself using a much simpler or understandable system, having heard or read allusions to modern computing being bloated and full of needless complexity from the likes of Kay, Wirth, Pike, etc. Or else I imagine myself using something built on a higher level language and with an ideological bent to the architecture that directs the user to the source code live while the program is in use, in sort of the way emacs seems to be designed, and as certain GNU, particularly Guile, developers seem interested in. Realistically, however, my fantasy simple (but not a hairshirt) system seems likely to continue to be OpenBSD.

You would have loved Genera. Genera was the system that Stallman was trying to clone in violation of the source licence agreement. This got him fired from his job at MIT and he stomped off and started the FSF. Everything was built with debugging symbols and full source was available. You could click on any object on the screen and inspect it with the debugger, go poking around in the code, modify it while it was running, whatever you wanted. Open source is nice, but no open source system has ever approached the magnificence of Symbolics Genera.

Genera is still my favorite operating system of all time, I kept a Symbolics XL1200 going until a few years ago. VMS is probably my second favorite, with OpenBSD third. All of these systems were very professionally put together, everything was fully documented, and things did what they were supposed to without frills or frivolities. Windows NT was actually like that in the first version (3.5), but went downhill rapidly after that as the Microsoft disease took hold..

[thirdm]

Originally Posted by kmike

You would have loved Genera. ... Open source is nice, but no open source system has ever approached the magnificence of Symbolics Genera.

Genera is still my favorite operating system of all time, I kept a Symbolics XL1200 going until a few years ago. VMS is probably my second favorite, with OpenBSD third. All of these systems were very professionally put together, everything was fully documented, and things did what they were supposed to without frills or frivolities. Windows NT was actually like that in the first version (3.5), but went downhill rapidly after that as the Microsoft disease took hold..

I look here http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/p...er_s_Guide.pdf and note that Genera, or at least Open Genera, was built from CLIM. I'd heard of this in my dabbling with common lisp, but the open source version McCLIM seems stalled last I looked. I'm wondering, if we take OpenBSD as a solid base, providing a nice tidy Unix, and want to think about what would be worthy to lay on top of it to provide a (comprehensive) windowing environment, would McCLIM be worth exploring? I mean, supposing we reject Gnome/GTK, KDE/Qt, Tk, Gnustep, Enlightenment, etc. Would it be better to think about laying on top of X11 (or its successor?) one of the recent Smalltalk revival efforts or something to be created out of McCLIM as a to do when I retire or windmill to tilt at as free time makes itself available?

I see on SDF's web page they have a Genera system but I don't think the general public has access to it.

[ocicat]

Side discussion on Genera has been separated from its parent thread:

http://daemonforums.org/showthread.p...4620#post54620

...as the intent of that thread was to announce the public release of OpenBSD 5.7.

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