Genera (operating system)
Genera is a commercial operating system and integrated development environment for Lisp machines created by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI), and Texas Instruments (TI). Genera was also sold by Symbolics as Open Genera, which runs Genera on computers based on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha processor using Tru64 UNIX. In 2021 a new version was released as Portable Genera which runs on Tru64 UNIX on Alpha, Linux on x86-64 and Arm64 Linux, and macOS on x86-64 and Arm64 (Apple Silicon M Series). It is released and licensed as proprietary software.
| Developer | Symbolics |
|---|---|
| Written in | Lisp |
| OS family | Lisp machine OS |
| Working state | Maintained |
| Source model | Source-available |
| Initial release | 1982 |
| Final release | Portable Genera 2.0 / 2021 |
| Available in | English |
| Platforms | various Symbolics Lisp Machines, DEC Alpha, x86-64, Arm64, Apple Silicon M Series |
| Kernel type | Object-oriented |
| Default user interface | Dynamic Windows GUI |
| License | Proprietary |
| Official website | symbolics-dks |
Genera is an example of an object-oriented operating system based on the programming language Lisp.
Genera supports incremental and interactive development of complex software using a mix of programming styles with extensive support for object-oriented programming.