Editing Genera (operating system) (section)

== MIT's Lisp machine operating system ==
The Lisp Machine operating system was written in [[Lisp Machine Lisp]]. It was a one-user workstation initially targeted at software developers for [[artificial intelligence]] (AI) projects.<ref>{{cite journal |title=A Lisp Machine |journal=Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computer Architecture for Non-numeric Processing |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery – Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval |year=1980 |doi=10.1145/800083.802703|last1=Greenblatt |first1=Richard D. |last2=Knight |first2=Thomas F. |last3=Holloway |first3=John T. |last4=Moon |first4=David A. |pages=137–138 |s2cid=10081363 }}</ref> The system had a large [[bitmap]] screen, a mouse, a keyboard, a [[Computer network|network]] interface, a disk drive, and slots for expansion. The operating system was supporting this hardware and it provided (among others):

* code for a frontend processor
* means to boot the operating system
* [[virtual memory]] management
* [[garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]]
* interface to various hardware: mouse, keyboard, bitmap frame buffer, disk, printer, network interface
* an interpreter and a native code compiler for Lisp Machine Lisp
* an object system: [[Flavors (programming language)|Flavors]]
* a [[graphical user interface]] (GUI) window system and [[window manager]]
* a local [[file system]]
* support for the [[Chaosnet]] (CHAOS) network
* an [[Emacs]]-like Editor named [[Zmacs]]
* a mail program named Zmail
* a Lisp listener
* a [[debugger]]

This was already a complete one-user Lisp-based operating system and development environment.

The MIT Lisp machine operating system was 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 [[free and open-source software]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.unlambda.com/index.php?n=Main.Mit |title=Retrocomputing – MIT CADR Lisp Machines |author=<!--Unstated--> |date=<!--Unstated--> |website=Unlambda.com |access-date=2018-12-01}}</ref>