Genera (operating system)

Genera
DeveloperSymbolics
Written inLisp
OS familyLisp machine OS
Working stateCurrent
Source modelSource-available
Initial release1982; 42 years ago (1982)
Final releasePortable Genera 2.0.6 / 17 August 2024; 2 months ago (2024-08-17)
Available inEnglish
Platformsvarious Symbolics Lisp Machines,
DEC Alpha,
x86-64,
Arm64,
Apple Silicon M Series
Kernel typeObject-oriented
Default
user interface
Dynamic Windows GUI
LicenseProprietary
Official websitesymbolics-dks.com

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.

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.