The DISER Lilith is a custom built

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

computer based on the

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a Information technology, hardware and F ...

(AMD) 2901

bit slicing Bit slicing is a technique for constructing a processor from modules of processors of smaller bit width, for the purpose of increasing the word length; in theory to make an arbitrary ''n''-bit central processing unit (CPU). Each of these c ...

processor, created by a group led by

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth ( IPA: ) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Tu ...

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

. Reprint. Reprint. The project began in 1977, and by 1984 several hundred workstations were in use. It has a high resolution full page portrait oriented

cathode-ray tube A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms on an oscilloscope, a ...

display, a

mouse A mouse (: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus'' ...

, a

laser printer Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a Electric charge, negatively charged cylinder call ...

interface, and a

computer networking A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

interface. Its software is written fully in

Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...

and includes a

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

program named Lidas. The Lilith processor architecture is a

stack machine In computer science, computer engineering and programming language implementations, a stack machine is a computer processor or a Virtual machine#Process virtual machines, process virtual machine in which the primary interaction is moving short- ...

. Citing from Sven Erik Knudsen's contribution to "The Art of Simplicity": "Lilith's clock speed was around 7 MHz and enabled Lilith to execute between 1 and 2 million instructions (called M-code) per second. (...) Initially, the main memory was planned to have 65,536

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...

words A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its ...

memory, but soon after its 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

The development of Lilith was influenced by the

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It featu ...

from the

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

(1973) where

spent a sabbatical from 1976 to 1977. Unable to bring back one of the Alto systems to Europe, Wirth decided to build a new system from scratch between 1978 and 1980, selling it under the company name DISER (''Data Image Sound Processor and Emitter Receiver System''). In 1985, he had a second sabbatical leave to PARC, which led to the design of the Oberon System. Ceres, the follow-up to Lilith, was released in 1987.

Operating system

The Lilith

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(OS), named Medos-2, was developed at ETH Zurich, by Svend Erik Knudsen with advice from Wirth. It is a single user, object-oriented operating system built from modules of Modula-2. Its design influenced the design of the OS ''

Excelsior Excelsior may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature and poetry * "Excelsior" (Longfellow), an 1841 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow * "Excelsior", an 1877 picture book in verse by Bret Harte, published as an advertisement for the Sa ...

'', developed for the Soviet Kronos workstation (see below), by the Kronos Research Group (KRG).

Soviet variants

From 1986 into the early 1990s,

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

technologists created and produced a line of

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB), also called printed wiring board (PWB), is a Lamination, laminated sandwich structure of electrical conduction, conductive and Insulator (electricity), insulating layers, each with a pattern of traces, planes ...

systems, and workstations based on them, all named Kronos. The workstations were based on Lilith, and made in small numbers.

Mouse

The

computer mouse A computer mouse (plural mice; also mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects Plane (mathematics), two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of the Cursor (user interface)#Po ...

of the Lilith was custom-designed, and later used with the Smaky computers. It then inspired the first mice produced by Logitech.

Gallery

File:Diser Lilith-IMG 1729.jpg, The vertical screen, keyboard and mouse of the Diser Lilith File:Lilith-IMG 7326.jpg, Vertical tower central unit File:Lilith-Internal-View.jpg, Internal view of the Lilith, showcasing the CPU boards File:Lilith-Front-View.jpg, Front view of the Lilith workstation

References

External links

Documentation on BitSavers

Geissman, L et al. (August 1982) Lilith Handbook

Wirth, N (1981) The Personal Computer Lilith
* tp://ftp.dreesen.ch/Emulith Emulith emulator for the Lilithbr>homepage
and tp://ftp.dreesen.ch/Emulith/Emulith_Manual.pdf documentation
Lilith and Modula-2
*

{{Wirth Computer workstations Computers using bit-slice designs High-level language computer architecture