Symbolics
Encyclopedia
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma
Macsyma
Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT as part of Project MAC and later marketed commercially...
computer algebra system
Computer algebra system
A computer algebra system is a software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics. The core functionality of a CAS is manipulation of mathematical expressions in symbolic form.-Symbolic manipulations:...
.
The symbolics.com domain was originally registered on 15 March 1985, making it the first .com
.com
The domain name com is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations...
-domain in the world. However, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments. The current Symbolics web site is available at symbolics-dks.com.
History
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, and later in Concord, Massachusetts
Concord, Massachusetts
Concord is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the town population was 17,668. Although a small town, Concord is noted for its leading roles in American history and literature.-History:...
, with manufacturing facilities in Chatsworth, California (a suburban section of Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
). Its first CEO, chairman, and founder was Russell Noftsker
Russell Noftsker
Russell Noftsker is an American entrepreneur who notably founded Symbolics, and was its first chairman and president.-Biography:Steven Levy described Noftsker as "A compactly built blond with pursed features and blue eyes"...
. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machine
Lisp machine
Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...
s, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...
. Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera for Tru64 UNIX
Tru64 UNIX
Tru64 UNIX is a 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture , currently owned by Hewlett-Packard . Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation , where it was known as Digital UNIX .As its original name suggests, Tru64...
on the HP
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
Alpha
DEC Alpha
Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
. The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available "workstation" (although that word had not yet been coined).
Symbolics was a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab, one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines. The other was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.
Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2 (introduced in 1981), was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design. The operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and software development environment, over 500,000 lines, was written in Lisp from the microcode up, based on MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp
Lisp Machine Lisp
Lisp Machine Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, a direct descendant of Maclisp, and was initially developed in the mid to late 1970s as the systems programming language for the MIT Lisp machines. Lisp Machine Lisp was also the Lisp dialect with the most influence on the design of...
.
The software bundle was later renamed ZetaLisp, to distinguish the Symbolics' product from other vendors who had also licensed the MIT software. Symbolics' Zmacs
Zmacs
Zmacs is one of the many variants of the Emacs text editor. Zmacs was written for the MIT Lisp machine and runs on its descendants . Zmacs is written in Lisp Machine Lisp...
text editor, a variant of Emacs
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
, was implemented in a text-processing package named "ZWEI", an acronym for "Zwei was Eine initially" — "Eine" being an acronym for "Eine Is Not Emacs" (both recursive acronym
Recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym or initialism that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands...
s and puns on the German words for "One" ("Eins", "Eine") and "Two" ("Zwei")).
The Lisp Machine system software was then copyrighted by MIT, and was licensed to Symbolics. Until 1981, they shared all the source code with MIT and kept it on an MIT server. According to a Symbolics employee, the reason for the change in policy was Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
's making changes with which they disagreed, such as removing Symbolics' copyright notices on Symbolics' produced enhancements and transferring the resulting enhancements to the other commercial licensees, and at one point leaving the software in a state where it would not compile. Richard Stallman's account claims Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to it, and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment.
Symbolics felt that they no longer had sufficient control over their product. At that point, Symbolics began using their own copy of the software, located on their company servers — while Stallman says that Symbolics did that to prevent its Lisp improvements from flowing to Lisp Machines, Inc. From that base, Symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software, and continued to deliver almost all the source code to their customers (including MIT). However, the policy prohibited MIT staff from distributing the Symbolics version of the software to others. With the end of open collaboration came the end of the MIT hacker community. As a reaction to this, Stallman initiated the GNU
GNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
project to make a new community. Eventually, Copyleft
Copyleft
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...
and the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
would ensure that a hacker's software could remain free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
. In this way Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating the free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
.
| Model | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| LM-2 | 1981 | Workstation based on the MIT CADR architecture |
The 3600 Series
Bit
A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...
word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
(divided up as 4 or 8 bits of tags, and 32 bits of data or 28 bits of memory address). Memory words were 44 bits, the additional 8 bits being used for error-correcting code (ECC). The instruction set
Instruction set
An instruction set, or instruction set architecture , is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O...
was that of a stack machine
Stack machine
A stack machine may be* A real or emulated computer that evaluates each sub-expression of a program statement via a pushdown data stack and uses a reverse Polish notation instruction set....
. The 3600 architecture provided 4,096 hardware registers, of which half were used as a cache
CPU cache
A CPU cache is a cache used by the central processing unit of a computer to reduce the average time to access memory. The cache is a smaller, faster memory which stores copies of the data from the most frequently used main memory locations...
for the top of the control stack; the rest were used by the microcode and time-critical routines of the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and Lisp run-time environment. Hardware support was provided for virtual memory
Virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory is a memory management technique developed for multitasking kernels. This technique virtualizes a computer architecture's various forms of computer data storage , allowing a program to be designed as though there is only one kind of memory, "virtual" memory, which...
, which was common for machines in its class, and for garbage collection
Garbage collection (computer science)
In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program...
, which was unique.
The original 3600 processor was a microprogrammed design like the CADR, and was built on several large circuit boards from standard TTL
Transistor-transistor logic
Transistor–transistor logic is a class of digital circuits built from bipolar junction transistors and resistors. It is called transistor–transistor logic because both the logic gating function and the amplifying function are performed by transistors .TTL is notable for being a widespread...
integrated circuit
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
s, both features being common for commercial computers in its class at the time. CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
clock speed varied depending on the particular instruction being executed, but was typically around 5 MHz. Many Lisp primitives could be executed in a single clock cycle. Disk I/O was handled by multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
at the microcode level. A 68000 processor (known as the "Front-End Processor", or FEP) started the main computer up, and handled the slower peripherals during normal operation. An Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
interface was standard equipment, replacing the Chaosnet
CHAOSnet
Chaosnet was first developed by Thomas Knight and Jack Holloway at MIT's AI Lab in 1975 and thereafter. It refers to two separate, but closely related, technologies...
interface of the LM-2.
The 3600 was roughly the size of a household refrigerator. This was partly due to the size of the processor — the cards were widely spaced to allow wire-wrap prototype cards to fit without interference — and partly due to the limitations of the disk drive technology in the early 1980s. At the 3600's introduction, the smallest disk drive that could support the ZetaLisp software was 14 inch
Inch
An inch is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including Imperial units, and United States customary units. There are 36 inches in a yard and 12 inches in a foot...
es (356 mm) across (most 3600s shipped with the Fujitsu Eagle
Fujitsu Eagle
The Fujitsu M2351 "Eagle" was a hard disk drive with an SMD interface that was used on many servers in the mid-1980s. It offered an unformatted capacity of 470 MB in of 19-inch rack space, at a retail price of about US$10,000....
). The 3670 and 3675 were slightly shorter in height, but were essentially the same machine packed a little tighter. The advent of 8 inch (203 mm), and later 5¼ inch (133 mm), disk drives that could hold hundreds of megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
s led to the introduction of the 3640 and 3645, which were roughly the size of a two-drawer file cabinet.
Later versions of the 3600 architecture were implemented on custom integrated circuits, reducing the 5 cards of the original processor design to 2, at a large manufacturing cost savings but with performance slightly better than the old design. The 3650, first of the "G machines" (as they were known within the company), was housed in a cabinet derived from the 3640s. Denser memory and smaller disk drives enabled the introduction of the 3620, about the size of a modern full-size tower PC. The 3630 was a "fat 3620" with room for more memory and video interface cards. The 3610 was a lower priced variant of the 3620, essentially identical in every way except that it was licensed for application deployment rather than general development.
| Model | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 3600 | 1983 | Workstation |
| 3670 | 1984 | Workstation |
| 3640 | 1984 | Workstation |
| 3675 | 1985 | Workstation |
| 3645 | 1985 | Workstation |
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
research and commercial applications throughout the 1980s. The AI commercialization boom of the 1980s led directly to Symbolics' success during the decade. Symbolics computers were widely believed to be the best platform available for developing AI software.
Also contributing to the 3600 series' success was a line of bit-mapped graphics color video interfaces, combined with extremely powerful animation software. Symbolics' Graphics Division, headquartered in Westwood, California
Westwood, Los Angeles, California
Westwood is a neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the home of the University of California, Los Angeles .-History:...
, a stone's throw from the major Hollywood movie and TV studios, made its S-Render and S-Paint software into industry leaders in the animation business.
Symbolics developed the first workstations capable of processing HDTV
High-definition television
High-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
quality video, which enjoyed a popular following in Japan. A 3600 — with the standard black-and-white monitor — made a cameo appearance in the movie Real Genius
Real Genius
Real Genius is a 1985 satirical comedy film directed by Martha Coolidge. The film's screenplay was written by Neal Israel, Pat Proft and Peter Torokvei. It stars Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret....
. The company was also referenced in Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park.
Symbolics' Graphics Division was sold to Nichimen Trading Company in the early 90s, and the S-Graphics software suite (S-Paint, S-Geometry, S-Dynamics, S-Render) ported to Franz Allegro Common Lisp on SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
and PC computers running Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
. Today it is sold as Mirai by Izware LLC, and continues to be used in major motion pictures (most famously in New Line Cinema's Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy
The Lord of the Rings is an epic film trilogy consisting of three fantasy adventure films based on the three-volume book of the same name by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. The films are The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers and The Return of the King .The films were directed by Peter...
), video games, and military simulations.
Connection Machine
The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
massively parallel computers manufactured by Thinking Machines Inc., another MIT spinoff based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Connection Machine ran a parallel variant of Lisp and, initially, was used primarily by the AI community, so the Symbolics Lisp machine was a particularly good fit as a front-end machine.
For a long time, the operating system didn't have a name, but was finally named "Genera" around 1984. The system included a number of advanced dialects of Lisp. Its heritage was MACLISP
Maclisp
MACLISP is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. It originated at MIT's Project MAC in the late 1960s and was based on Lisp 1.5. Richard Greenblatt was the main developer of the original codebase for the PDP-6; Jonl White was responsible for its later maintenance and development...
on the PDP-10, but it included more data types, and multiple-inheritance object-oriented programming features.
Initially called Lisp Machine Lisp
Lisp Machine Lisp
Lisp Machine Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, a direct descendant of Maclisp, and was initially developed in the mid to late 1970s as the systems programming language for the MIT Lisp machines. Lisp Machine Lisp was also the Lisp dialect with the most influence on the design of...
, then ZetaLisp, it finally acquired the name "Symbolics Common Lisp" during the creation of Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
in 1987. Common Lisp is a subset of the dialect available on the Lisp Machine.
Ivory and Open Genera
Gigabyte
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...
s (GB) of memory; the increase in address space
Address space
In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity.- Overview :...
reflected the growth of programs and data as semiconductor memory and disk space became cheaper. The Ivory processor had 8 bits of ECC attached to each word, so each word fetched from external memory to the chip was actually 48 bits wide. Each Ivory instruction was 18 bits wide and two instructions plus a 2-bit CDR code and 2-bit Data Type were in each instruction word fetched from memory. Fetching two instruction words at a time from memory enhanced the Ivory's performance. Unlike the 3600's microprogrammed architecture, the Ivory instruction set was still microcoded, but was stored in a 1200 x 180 bit ROM inside the Ivory chip. The initial Ivory processors were fabricated by VLSI Technology Inc in San Jose, California on a 2 µm
Micrometre
A micrometer , is by definition 1×10-6 of a meter .In plain English, it means one-millionth of a meter . Its unit symbol in the International System of Units is μm...
CMOS process, with later generations fabricated by Hewlett Packard in Corvalis, Oregon on a 1.25 µm and 1 µm CMOS processes. The Ivory had a stack architecture and operated a 4 stage pipeline: Fetch, Decode, Execute and Write Back. Ivory processors were marketed in stand-alone Lisp Machines (the XL400, XL1200, and XL1201), headless Lisp Machines (NXP1000), and on add-in cards for Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
(UX400, UX1200) and Apple Macintosh (MacIvory I, II, III) computers. The Lisp Machines with Ivory processors operated at speeds that were between two and six times faster than a 3600 depending on the model and the revision of the Ivory chip.
| Model | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| MacIvory I | 1988 | Nubus Board for Apple Macintosh |
| XL400 | 1988 | Workstation, VMEBus |
| MacIvory II | 1989 | Nubus Board for Apple Macintosh |
| UX400 | 1989 | VMEBus Board for SUN |
| XL1200 | 1990 | Workstation, VMEBus |
| UX1200 | 1990 | VMEBus Board for SUN |
| MacIvory III | 1991 | Nubus Board for Apple Macintosh |
| XL1201 | 1992 | Compact Workstation, VMEBus |
| NXP1000 | 1992 | Headless Machine |
The Ivory instruction set
Instruction set
An instruction set, or instruction set architecture , is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O...
was later emulated in software for microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
s implementing the 64-bit Alpha
DEC Alpha
Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
architecture. The "Virtual Lisp Machine" emulator
Emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
, combined with the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and software development environment from the XL machines, is sold as Open Genera.
Sunstone
Sunstone was a RISC-like processor that was to be released shortly after the Ivory. It was designed by Ron Lebel's group at the Symbolics Westwood office. However, the project was canceled the day it was supposed to tape out.Endgame
As quickly as the commercial AI boom of the mid 1980s had propelled Symbolics to success, the "AI WinterAI winter
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The process of hype, disappointment and funding cuts are common in many emerging technologies , but the problem has been particularly acute for AI...
" of the late 1980s and early 1990s, combined with the slow down of Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense
Missile defense
Missile defense is a system, weapon, or technology involved in the detection, tracking, interception and destruction of attacking missiles. Originally conceived as a defence against nuclear-armed Intercontinental ballistic missiles , its application has broadened to include shorter-ranged...
program, for which DARPA had invested heavily in AI solutions, severely damaged Symbolics. An internal war between Noftsker and the CEO the board had hired in 1986, Brian Sear, over whether to follow Sun's suggested lead and focus on selling their software, or to re-emphasize their superior hardware, and the ensuing lack of focus when both Noftsker and Sear were fired from the company caused sales to plummet. This fact, combined with some ill-advised real estate deals by company management during the boom years (they had entered into large long-term lease obligations in California), drove Symbolics into bankruptcy
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
. Rapid evolution in mass-market microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
technology (the "PC revolution"), advances in Lisp compiler technology, and the economics of manufacturing custom microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
s severely diminished the commercial advantages of purpose-built Lisp machines. By 1995, the Lisp machine era had ended, and with it Symbolics' hopes for success.
Symbolics continues as an enterprise with very limited revenues, supported mainly by service contracts on the remaining MacIvory, UX-1200, UX-1201, and other machines still used by commercial customers. Symbolics also sells Virtual Lisp Machine (VLM) software for DEC, Compaq and HP Alpha-based workstations (AlphaStation
AlphaStation
AlphaStation was the name given to a series of computer workstations, produced from 1994 onwards by Digital Equipment Corporation, and latterly by Compaq and HP. As the name suggests, the AlphaStations were based on the DEC Alpha 64-bit microprocessor...
) and servers (AlphaServer
AlphaServer
AlphaServer was the name given to a series of server computers, produced from 1994 onwards by Digital Equipment Corporation, and latterly by Compaq and HP. As the name suggests, the AlphaServers were based on the DEC Alpha 64-bit microprocessor...
), refurbished MacIvory IIs and Symbolics keyboards.
In July 2005, Symbolics closed its Chatsworth, California maintenance facility. The reclusive owner of the company, Andrew Topping, died that same year. The current legal status of Symbolics software is uncertain. An assortment of Symbolics hardware was still available for purchase as of August 2007.
First .com domain
Symbolics.com, was the first (and, since it is still registered, the oldest) registered .com.com
The domain name com is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations...
domain of the Internet. The symbolics.com domain was purchased by XF.com in 2009.
Networking
Genera also featured the most extensive networking interoperability software seen to that point. A local area networkLocal area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
system called Chaosnet
CHAOSnet
Chaosnet was first developed by Thomas Knight and Jack Holloway at MIT's AI Lab in 1975 and thereafter. It refers to two separate, but closely related, technologies...
had been invented for the Lisp Machine (predating the commercial availability of Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
). The Symbolics system supported Chaosnet, but also had one of the first TCP/IP
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
implementations. It also supported DECNET and IBM's SNA network protocols. A Dialnet protocol used phone lines and modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s. Genera would, using hints from its distributed "namespace" database (somewhat similar to DNS
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
, but more comprehensive, like parts of Xerox's Grapevine), automatically select the best protocol combination to use when connecting to network service. An application program (or a user command) would only specify the name of the host and the desired service. For example, a host name and a request for "Terminal Connection" might yield a connection over TCP/IP using the TELNET protocol (although there were many other possibilities). Likewise, requesting a file operation (such as a Copy File command) might pick NFS, FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...
, NFILE (the Symbolics network file access protocol), or one of several others, and it might execute the request over TCP/IP, Chaosnet, or whatever other network was most suitable.
Contributions to computer science
Symbolics' research and development staff (first at MIT, and then later at the company) produced a number of major innovations in software technology:- Flavors, one of the earliest object-oriented extensions to Lisp, was a message-passing object system patterned after SmalltalkSmalltalkSmalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
, but with multiple inheritanceMultiple inheritanceMultiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which a class can inherit behaviors and features from more than one superclass....
and a number of other enhancements. The Symbolics operating systemOperating systemAn operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
made heavy use of Flavors objects. The experience gained with Flavors led to the design of New Flavors, a short-lived successor based on generic functionGeneric functionIn certain systems for object-oriented programming such as the Common Lisp Object System and Dylan, a generic function is an entity made up of all methods having the same name. Typically a generic function itself is an instance of a class that inherits both from function and standard-object...
s rather than message passingMessage passingMessage passing in computer science is a form of communication used in parallel computing, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. In this model, processes or objects can send and receive messages to other processes...
. Many of the concepts in New Flavors formed the basis of the CLOSCLOSThe Common Lisp Object System is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object...
(Common Lisp Object System) standard. - Advances in garbage collectionGarbage collection (computer science)In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program...
techniques by Henry BakerHenry Baker (computer scientist)Henry Givens Baker Jr. is a computer scientist who has made contributions in garbage collection, functional programming languages, and linear logic. He was also one of the founders of Symbolics...
, David MoonDavid MoonDavid A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language and being one of the founders of Symbolics.-Projects:* CLOS* MIT* Symbolics, where he developed generational garbage collection algorithms...
and others, particularly the first commercial use of generational scavenging, allowed Symbolics computers to run large Lisp programs for months at a time. - Symbolics staffers Dan Weinreb, David MoonDavid MoonDavid A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language and being one of the founders of Symbolics.-Projects:* CLOS* MIT* Symbolics, where he developed generational garbage collection algorithms...
, Neal Feinberg, Kent PitmanKent PitmanKent M. Pitman is the President of and has been involved for many years in the design, implementation and use of Lisp and Scheme systems. He is often better known by his initials KMP.Kent Pitman is the author of the Common Lisp Condition System...
, Scott McKay, Sonya Keene and others made significant contributions to the emerging Common Lisp language standard from the mid-1980s through the release of the ANSIAmerican National Standards InstituteThe American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...
Common Lisp standard in 1994. - Symbolics introduced one of the first commercial object-oriented databaseDatabaseA database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
s, Statice, in 1989. The developers of Statice later went on to found Object Design, Inc. and create ObjectStoreObjectStoreObjectStore is a commercial object database, which is a specialized type of database designed to handle data created by applications that use object-oriented programming techniques. It is inspired by the Statice database originally developed at Symbolics. ObjectStore is innovative in its use of...
. - Symbolics introduced in 1987 one of the first commercial microprocessorMicroprocessorA microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
s designed to support the execution of Lisp programs: the Symbolics Ivory. Symbolics also used its own CAD system (NS, New Schematic) for the development of the Ivory chip. - Under contract from AT&T, Symbolics developed Minima, a real-time Lisp run-time environment and operating system for the Ivory processor. This was delivered in a small hardware configuration featuring lots of RAM (no disk) and dual network ports. It was used as the basis for a next-generation carrier class long-distance telephone switch.
- The Graphics Division's Craig ReynoldsCraig Reynolds (computer graphics)Craig W. Reynolds , is an artificial life and computer graphics expert, who created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. Reynolds worked on the film Tron as a scene programmer, and on Batman Returns as part of the video image crew. He is the author of the OpenSteer library.-External...
devised an algorithm that simulated the flocking behavior of birds in flight. "BoidsBoidsBoids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference...
" made their first appearance at SIGGRAPHSIGGRAPHSIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...
in the 1987 animated short "Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the IceStanley and Stella in: Breaking the IceStanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice, also known as Love Found is a 1987 computer animated short film.- Synopsis :Birds and fish are moving around different halves of a sphere, separated by a sheet of ice. One bird and one fish notice each other and approach their sides of the ice sheet...
", produced by the Graphics Division. Reynolds went on to win the Scientific And Engineering Award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998. - The Symbolics Document ExaminerSymbolics Document ExaminerSymbolics Document Examiner was a powerful and early hypertext system developed at Symbolics by Janet Walker in 1985...
hypertextHypertextHypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
system originally used for the Symbolics manuals- it was based on Zmacs following a design by Janet Walker, and proved influential in the evolution of hypertext. - Symbolics was very active in the design and development of the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) presentation-based User Interface Management System. CLIM is a descendant of Dynamic Windows, Symbolics' own window system. CLIM was the result of the collaboration of several Lisp companies.
- Symbolics produced the first workstation which could genlockGenlockGenlock is a common technique where the video output of one source, or a specific reference signal from a signal generator, is used to synchronize other television picture sources together. The aim in video and digital audio applications is to ensure the coincidence of signals in time at a...
, the first to have real time video I/O, the first to support digital video I/O and the first to do HDTV.
Symbolics Graphics Division
The Symbolics Graphics Division (SGD, founded in 1982, sold to Nichimen Graphics in 1992) developed the S-Graphics software suite (S-Paint, S-Geometry, S-Dynamics, S-Render) for Symbolics Genera.Movies
This software was also used to create a few computer animated movies and was used for some popular movies.- 1984, graphics for the little screens about the bridges of the Enterprise and the Klingon ship in Star Trek III: The Search for SpockStar Trek III: The Search for SpockStar Trek III: The Search for Spock is a 1984 motion picture released by Paramount Pictures. The film is the third feature based on the Star Trek science fiction franchise and is the center of a three-film story arc that begins with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and concludes with Star Trek IV:...
- 1985, 3D animations for Real GeniusReal GeniusReal Genius is a 1985 satirical comedy film directed by Martha Coolidge. The film's screenplay was written by Neal Israel, Pat Proft and Peter Torokvei. It stars Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret....
- 1987, Symbolics, Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the IceStanley and Stella in: Breaking the IceStanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice, also known as Love Found is a 1987 computer animated short film.- Synopsis :Birds and fish are moving around different halves of a sphere, separated by a sheet of ice. One bird and one fish notice each other and approach their sides of the ice sheet...
- 1989, Symbolics, The Little Death
- 1990, Symbolics, Ductile Flow, presented at SIGGRAPH 1990
- 1990, 3D animations for Jetsons: The MovieJetsons: The MovieJetsons: The Movie is a 1990 animated science fiction film produced by Hanna-Barbera and released on July 6, 1990, by Universal Pictures based on the hit cartoon series, The Jetsons . The movie features the final voice roles of George O'Hanlon and Mel Blanc who both died during production of the film...
- 1991, Symbolics, Virtually Yours
- 1993, 3D animation of the Orca for Free WillyFree WillyFree Willy is a 1993 family film directed by Simon Wincer, and released by Warner Bros. under its Family Entertainment label. The film stars Jason James Richter as a young boy who befriends an orca whale, named "Willy."...
External links
- new Symbolics, Inc. domain
- "Symbolics Technical Summary"
- The Symbolics Museum
- Archives from the Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) Mailing List, 1986-1993
- [ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/slug/ Archives from the Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) Mailing List, 1990-1999]
- Ralf Möller's Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum
- A page of screenshots of Genera
- "Genera Concepts" — (Web copy of Symbolic's introduction to Genera)
- "Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of Heterogenous engineering" — (PDF file)
- Literature on Symbolics and Lisp machines — (from the Symbolics Lisp Machine)
- A collection of press releases from Symbolics
- "Symbolics announces the first true Single-Chip Lisp CPU" — (Symbolics press release announcing the Ivory chip)
- Entry for Symbolics on WikiWikiWebWikiWikiWebWikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...
- Lisp machines timeline -(a timeline of Symbolics' and others' Lisp machines)
- "Why Did Symbolics Fail?" -(by Daniel Weinreb)