Lilith (computer)

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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."

[edit] 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.

[edit] Notes

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

[edit] 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