About a year ago or so I was bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and since then I've become very interested in Lisp machines, particularly Symbolics machines running the Genera operating system. I'm in my late 20's and thus I wasn't around when Lisp machines were in their heyday; however, I believe that it's sad how the proverbial baby (Lisp OSes such as Genera) was thrown out with the bathwater (Lisp machines) when Lisp machines were gradually replaced with Unix workstations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would have been nice had Genera or another Lisp OS been ported to the x86 instead of Lisp users having to switch to Unix. Sometimes I even dream of an alternative history where RMS embarked on a GNU-licensed Lisp operating system instead of GNU.
I wonder what type of legal challenges are inherent in making Genera open source? My limited understanding of the situation is that the IP of Symbolics is held up in an odd manner due to the dissolution of the company, but I don't know all of the details. It would be nice if Genera were open source and ported to the x86-64. Barring that, a free software clone of Genera would be nice, but it may be a substantial implementation effort.
It would have been easier to create a port of the LMI or TI systems to a workstation or 386 PC, they only ever used a 32 bit word. TI would have been the obvious candidate as they were building 68020 systems that used the same case as the Explorer. Add a simple external MMU to the 68020 and a native compiler and it would be reasonably fast.
I guess that LMI didn't have enough staff to look at something like this back then. There is a new Lambda emulator if anyone wants to play with it [1].
Xerox did port their software to workstations and I believe it is still sold by Venue.