Samsung announces 0.35 micron ASIC family featuring 24Mb of embedded DRAM in a unified process

[David Gadbois]

   Date: Tue, 06 May 1997 19:19:05 -0400
   From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>

   How good is "Open Genera?" Do they hide Unix effectively? If it were
   free would it be "LispOS" or a nice free "Lisp on Unix?"

I haven't seen the beta for version 2.0, but 1.0 was very good.  At a
user level, it was like using a lispm with an awful keyboard.  The UI
used the X client (still the fanciest X application I have ever seen),
and it got raw packets from the underlying OS, so all the cool
networking stuff worked fine.

It did a pretty good job of hiding OSF/1, but there were times when it
really broke through and bit you.  At the time, OSF/1 used fixed
kernel-compile time sizes for various important and obscure system
tables, and figuring out what was the problem and fixing it was a big
chore.  For example, there is a fixed limit on the number of running
changes in VM page protections.  (That one was a real head-scratcher.)
It also had various obscure performance sink holes.  For example, it
is still a pain to keep it from swapping out an 800MB process so it
can free up a single page.

In summary, then, something similar wouldn't suck, but I would still
rather have Lisp all the way down.

--David Gadbois