Lilith (computer system)
.jpg)
Lilith is the name of a computer system developed in 1980 by the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth at the ETH Zurich .
The Lilith workstations served as a platform for numerous software projects in research in the early 1980s. They were among the first computers with a bitmap display, mouse and a window-oriented user interface. They were operated in a local network and were printed out on laser printers, which were also new at the time .
From 1982 attempts were made to market the system. It was a failure commercially, but the futuristic machine influenced a generation of computer scientists.
In 1977/78, Wirth got to know the pioneering architecture of the Alto workstations at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Institute , which was already equipped with a mouse, graphic screen and window technology. After his return, Wirth and his group began to develop such a workstation themselves, where they co-developed hardware and software.
In this way, Modula-2 , the successor to Pascal , was generated as the system language and Medos-2 as the operating system . The Modula-2 compiler translated into a compact intermediate code (so-called M code ) that could be interpreted directly on the hardware. The basis was a “ bit-sliced ” 16-bit processor composed of four-bit AMD Am2900 components . Wirth had coordinated its instruction set with the intermediate code of the Modula-2 compiler. With a system clock of 7 MHz, the Lilith could execute one to two million of these instructions per second. The original Lilith had 128 kB of memory and a screen with 704 × 928 pixels (portrait format), later versions had a resolution of 1024 pixels.
According to Niklaus Wirth, the name "Lilith" goes back to the goddess of the same name in Sumerian mythology.
See also
The Ceres computer system also comes from Wirth and is optimized for the Oberon programming language .
