Loper OS

Better screen shots from other people:
Ralf Moeller
Rainer Joswig

Behold:
“The rolling element is a sphere a foot or so across, the upper part of which fits into a cage equipped with motors and drive-wheels.  The rider sits on a saddle projecting up from this framework.  Should he begin to topple, accelerometers detect the movement instantly, and the onboard microprocessor commands [...]

As a child, I was quite fond of old-fashioned Lego bricks.  One very endearing but rarely discussed property of such bricks is their durability, bordering on the indestructible.  Almost any abuse inflicted on a Lego structure will, at worst, leave you with a pile of bricks entirely like the one you started with.  Even the most [...]

The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle, was greeted with fanfare for including a feature which allows users to “lend” a purchased book to anyone, with a guarantee of recovering it later. The first announcement I came across mentioned no other rules governing the lending process. My first thought was that [...]

Let’s take another look at the console. There are several boards inside, but this is the only one which deals in custom Symbolics protocols (as opposed to the widely-known intricacies of operating a black-and-white CRT.)

The rough annotations are my own. Click on the pictures for super-size (~10MB!) images.
Once again, the Phase Encoded Video decoder board:

A: [...]

The machine does indeed power up and run:

But this is not enough.
The console is a museum piece. While a Lisp Machine circa 1986 might last for a reasonably long time between repairs, a CRT of the same vintage likely will not. Moreover, it is a pain to have around, even if it were indestructible. Wouldn’t [...]

The modern high-level-language programmer thinks (if he is of the thinking kind) of low-level system architecture as a stubborn enemy, or, at best, a harsh and indifferent force of nature. Anyone who suggests that everyday desktop apps ought to be written directly in a CPU’s native instruction set is viewed as much the same [...]

Yossi Kreinin throws down the gauntlet to all those who believe that a CPU ought to be designed specifically around the needs of high-level languages:
Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren’t “brain-damaged”/”built to run C”/”a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)”? You do think so? I [...]

The aim of Loper is to build a sane computing environment on top of the ubiquitous yet nauseatingly flawed X86-64 architecture.  I believe that it is possible to abstract away its most damning shortcomings, such as the lack of direct hardware support for capabilities, orthogonal persistence, type-checking, and garbage collection.  However, wouldn’t it be nice if we were not [...]

1) There surely must be a better way to figure out the Cirrus Logic GD5446 video card than by reading the QEMU sources.
2) It appears that I never explained where the project’s name came from. It could, if you like, refer to a Lisp Operating system. I must, however, confess that it is the name [...]