Symbolics UX-1200

A very rare part is the UX-1200 board from Symbolics. This is a Lisp machine. It can be plugged into a Sun VME-Bus Server. I even have a suitable operating system (Genera 8.3) for it. The UX-1200 (same CPU as the standalone XL-1200) was (is) the biggest and fastest Lisp-Machine ever built by Symbolics, before they went bankrupt. But there are rumours, that some developers still continue working.

The Lisp machine does have (ok, ok, a very primitive) LISP as assembly language. All I/O is done by the hosting Sun. The Sun needs special device drivers to be able to control the Lisp machine.

Access to the disks and to the ethernet is done through the Sun. Each Lisp machine (a Sun can host up to five) needs a "world", which contains their files and programs. From the outside view this is a huge (300 MB and more) file.

Genera 8.3

Genera is the name of Symbolics' operating system. The latest version is 8.3. There are a lot of nifty programs available for Genera, for example the Emacs (what else!?!), a C-compiler, a Web-server and many many more. Especially the user interface is funny: The Lisp machine simply opens its Lisp browser on a given X-Terminal or X-Display, when the board is activated. This is accomplished by running a program on the hosting Sun.