Lilith

Lilith is the name of custom built workstation using the AMD 2901 bit-slice processor by the group of Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. The project started in 1977 and by 1984 several hundred workstations were in use. It had a high resolution full page display, a mouse, a laser printer interface, and a network interface. Its software was written completely in Modula-2 and included a relational database program called Lidas.

Citing from Sven Erik Knudsen's contribution to "The Art of Simplicity (see References): "Lilith's clock speed was 7 MHz and enabled the Lilith to execute between 1 and 2 MIPS (M-Code instructions). (...) Initially, the main memory was planned to have 65,536 16-bit words memory, but soon after the first version, it was enlarged to twice that capacity. For regular Modula-2 programs, however, only the initial 65,536 words were usable for storage of variables."

History

This section requires expansion.

The development of Lilith was influenced by the Xerox Alto from the Xerox PARC (1973) where Niklaus Wirth spent a sabbatical from 1976 to 1977. Unable to bring back one of the Alto to Europe, Wirth decided to build a new system from scratch [1]. In 1985 he had a second sabbatical leave to PARC, which led to the design of the Oberon System.

Notes

There was also a Soviet clone of the Lilith called Kronos.

External links & References

• Geissman, L et al. (August 1982) Lilith Handbook (PDF file)
• Knudsen, S (1983) Medos-2: A Modula-2 Oriented Operating System for the Personal Computer Lilith (PDF file)
• Wirth, N (1981) The Personal Computer Lilith (PDF file)
• A Brief History of Modula and Lilith
• Lilith and Modula-2
• An Emulator for the Lilithand its documentation
• ETHistory - Lilith Workstation
• AMD AM2901DC entry on CPU World

• The School of Niklaus Wirth "The Art of Simplicity" by László Böszörményi, Jürg Gutknecht, Gustav Pomberger (Ed.), 2000, Morgan Kaufmann ISBN 1-55860-723-4 & dpunkt, ISBN 3-932588-85-1

This computer hardware-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e