Sunday, May 16, 2010

Lisp Machine emulator

I've been having a lot of fun with virtual machines recently, and not just the JVM. I am running Windows 7 on Linux using Virtual Box, a great software (Virtual Box, not Windows 7). Today I managed to get a Texas Instrument Explorer lisp machine running in the Meroko microcode emulator on my Linux laptop. It boots a real TI Explorer machine image, so you can have fun with zmacs, Flavors and the lisp machine debugger.


Unfortunately it is not very usable for real work: it takes up one CPU core and it is still pretty slow to use. I wish I had time to fix it. The lisp machine's development environment is still better than Eclipse with SBCL . Of course today the future of Lisp is Clojure.

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