A successful lisp machine?

Kelly Murray kem@Franz.COM
Tue, 29 Apr 1997 14:48:03 -0700


> can't afford to reboot every time they need to run TeX.  Trying to

I see this machine as primarily only being on the network,
accessed via your web-browser running on your desktop machine.
So you can run "xv" on your desktop machine.

You power it on, and it boots up the Linux kernel, and /etc/init then starts up
Lisp, and maps in boot.db, and executes the generic function (boot-machine)
You can add :before or :after methods to this function.
It will create processes that establish network services,
the most important one being the web server.

Then from your web browser you connect to the machine, and by
accessing different URLs, you have user access to different
applications or user-interfaces to the system.
You want to change the IP address of the machine?
Perhaps there is some URL /internet-setup that allows it to be
changed.  Access URL /reboot and it confirms you want to reboot the
machine, and then it does so.

I think it should also be possible to run it alongside or on top
of Linux too, for those who only have a single machine.
In that case, either the OS-level user interfaces won't work
(probably appropriate)
or some ambitious person must write all the code that implements
the same interface in terms of the UNIX it is running on.  

-kelly edward murray