But it has a sophisticated process scheduler, several garbage collectors, complex memory management, various network stacks, implementations of file systems (local and remote), virtual memory paging, software installer, printer scheduler, namespace server for configuration of networked resources (users, networks, printers, hosts, ...), mail server and client, ...
It's not that it has "a subroutine" for a disk, but actually very extensive support for disks and file systems on disk.
It's just that everything runs in one spared memory space, incl. all applications. Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment.
> Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment.
I wonder.
I know this is safely in imagination world, but if I were to have a system like this connected to the Internet, and there were others with similar systems also connected to the Internet, I would guess requirements above and beyond what is already provided would be:
1) security / sandboxing
2) ease of sharing code
I’m pretty fuzzy on how #2 would happen. I spent so much time with Git these days it’s hard to imagine anything else. #1 is actually less hard for me to imagine: “The key to Genera's intelligence is the sharing of knowledge and information among all activities.” I can imagine the routines responsible for this being extended to handle sandboxing. But then again I have a pretty good imagination, so maybe in reality this is actually the more difficult part to implement.
At that time one put stuff on a remote machine acting as a file server. One would centrally configure which stuff is where. The Lisp Machine could also act as a file server. It then knew users, files directories, servers, access control lists, file versions, etc. To a non-Lisp Machine one used NFS, the Lisp Machine had its own remote file protocol called NFILE. One could share software also via tar files or via its one distribution format. Networked object stores were also being developed.
But that was all before encrypted network connections were used... we are talking about the 80s when TCP/IP just became a thing.
Today one would need to upgrade the network stack of a Lisp Machine to support something like TLS or use it only over VPNs...
It's not that it has "a subroutine" for a disk, but actually very extensive support for disks and file systems on disk.
It's just that everything runs in one spared memory space, incl. all applications. Probably not a winning way to design a networked OS in today's Internet environment.