The question asked was about the differences between the two software systems in the past.
From that perspective the two systems had very different objectives and target audiences.
Interlisp-D was focused on ease of use, the GUI, incremental development by researchers who weren't focused on programming per se. This explains the features around the GUI, error correction, programmer's assistant, source file management. Interlisp was forgiving.
I always imagined Symbolics Genera was designed for the expert user who wanted the most power, speed, capability possible.
Race car to off-track vehicle.
As for hardware, the Xerox D-machines weren't particuarly designed for Lisp.
Comparing the hardware is kind of irrelevant.
Today, medley runs 1000 times faster and a much larger address space, so there's enough room to try things.
The Medley Interlisp project includes many "help wanted" items in terms of documentation, testing, Common Lisp compatibility, and things relating to adapting to modern hardware (keyboard, mouse, display) and software (OS, installer, unicode, etc) as well as finishing some "work in progress"items that were done after Medley 2.0. We started with Medley 3.5 to get the larger address space (4 bits) and symbol space.
LTAND established a petition system where passed petitions could then be implemented by a "wizard".
A character named Grump wrote a petition trying to establish a way of moderating content and actions using "Arbitration" -- a kind of binding arbitration using an arbitrator (mutually agreed upon if feasible, or randomly chosen among those volunteering) to hear the sides of the dispute and propose a remedy.
A wizard (admin) named Froxx implemented arbitration, with immediately netative results: when code is law, the devil is in the details.
I suspect the tales of "Do what Warren Means" are apocryphal. We're now used to the idea of wasting CPU cycles to compute possible completions of user entries. DWIM was just ahead -- and a way of deciding "conservative guesses".
I'd like to put together a demo of DWIM at its best and worst.
small correction: Medley online.interisp.org doesn't run IN the browser -- it's running on a Linux-based Docker container with AWS.
You can also install it on your linux, macos, windows (with WSL or ...) and other computer/os interfaces.
Of historical interest was Interlisp-D as a system that did structure editing and version management. it was at the beginning of time so getting it to work again as a practical development environment is a lot of work.
From that perspective the two systems had very different objectives and target audiences.
Interlisp-D was focused on ease of use, the GUI, incremental development by researchers who weren't focused on programming per se. This explains the features around the GUI, error correction, programmer's assistant, source file management. Interlisp was forgiving.
I always imagined Symbolics Genera was designed for the expert user who wanted the most power, speed, capability possible.
Race car to off-track vehicle.
As for hardware, the Xerox D-machines weren't particuarly designed for Lisp. Comparing the hardware is kind of irrelevant.
Today, medley runs 1000 times faster and a much larger address space, so there's enough room to try things.
The Medley Interlisp project includes many "help wanted" items in terms of documentation, testing, Common Lisp compatibility, and things relating to adapting to modern hardware (keyboard, mouse, display) and software (OS, installer, unicode, etc) as well as finishing some "work in progress"items that were done after Medley 2.0. We started with Medley 3.5 to get the larger address space (4 bits) and symbol space.