My dream is for Symbolics Genera to become open source, though I'd be satisfied if hobbyist licenses for the DEC Alpha port were available at a reasonable price. Another dream that I have is to actually use a Symbolics Lisp machine; I've only seen screenshots of Genera and demos on Youtube. I was born near the end of the 1980s AI boom, and thus the only time I've seen a Lisp machine in person was at a trip to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley nearly six years ago. I'd love to buy one, except Symbolics Lisp machines are very rare, and when they occasionally show up on eBay, they are well beyond what I can afford. Even if I could afford one, I don't have enough room in my apartment for one, though a backup option that is workable (though still very expensive) is to purchase a MacIvory card and a compatible 68k Macintosh.
Thank you for the link. I had an opportunity to try out the online VM for Interlisp-D a few months ago; it works very well. I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D has been made open source and that there is a team of people who are contributing to it.
It seems that Xerox PARC's work on Lisp is less known than its work on Smalltalk, despite the fact that a Lisp heavyweight, Gregor Kiczales of "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" and aspect-oriented programming fame, worked there. Xerox PARC in its heyday was quite a fount of innovation, and the work done from the 1970s through roughly the 1990s (I don't know much about Xerox PARC beyond the 90s) remain a treasure trove of ideas that should be reexamined in today's world.
Interlisp/Medley is the only rich graphical LispM type environment that's open source. OpenGenera isn't and probably won't be, which is tragic, but there are many tragic things in this world.
What many of the commenters to my blog post in that link don't get is that it is not a good thing that there are commercial graphical Lisp IDEs.
For comparison: when there were multiple commercial Unix implementations, the result was increased fragmentation and slower development.
Linux, as a FOSS, PC-native Unix, has propelled Unix forwards more in the last 25Y or so than the previous 25Y of work on commercial Unix ever did.
Old Lisp hands tell people to learn Emacs and install SLIME or something. Well, Emacs is about as appealing as other kinds of slime, like slug mucus, are: to most younger types, it's repellent and disgusting.
Emacs is a horrible crusty old 1970s editor.
To make Lisp look appealing and interesting, then it needs a rich modern GUI, a rich set of libraries to call upon and ways to access others. It needs a fancy graphical editor to show off its power.
The world has a FOSS Common Lisp: it's SBCL.
Find some way to run Medley under SBCL, however ugly the hack. Linux was an ugly hack once. UNIX itself was an ugly hack once. There's nothing wrong with ugly hacks. They are to be encouraged. They are the keystone of FOSS.
Get Medley running under SBCL somehow so there's a 1980s graphical FOSS Lisp environment, not a 1970s text-based one.
Odds are it would be extremely easy with, say, an Arduino Pro Micro. I've interfaced a variety of old hardware (Sun Type 5 keyboard, Depraz mouse, original Macintosh mouse) via USB using one.
You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out, though, because not many people have those keyboards!
> You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out [...]
Sure, but as I'm not a good hardware tinkerer, ... but maybe I should visit some local self-repair community group and learn.
Symbolics produced a nubus(?) coprocessor with their Ivory chip in their final days, which used a box to interface the keyboard to Apple's ADB, but I never got hold of either the coprocesor nor the box.
I actually do have one keyboard in my archive of things (aka "stuff" ;-), but I have no idea how to interface it to modern hardware, sigh.