Lilith (computer)

DISER Lilith

Developer	ETH Zurich
Manufacturer	Modula Computer Systems
Product family	Wirth
Type	workstation
Release date	1980; 44 years ago (1980)
Introductory price	$8000
Discontinued	Yes
Units sold	120[1]
Units shipped	120
Media	Floppy disk 5.25 in (13.3 cm) 140 K
Operating system	Medos-2 (Modula-2)
CPU	AMD 2901
Memory	256 K (131,072 16-bit words)
Storage	15 MB hard disk
Display	12 in (30 cm) monochrome bitmapped
Dimensions	15.5 in × 15 in × 14.5 in (39 cm × 38 cm × 37 cm)
Marketing target	Research
Successor	Ceres

The DISER Lilith is a custom built workstation computer based on the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 2901 bit slicing processor, created by a group led by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich.^[2][3] 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 display, a mouse, a laser printer interface, and a computer networking interface. Its software is written fully in Modula-2 and includes a relational database program named Lidas.

The Lilith processor architecture is a stack machine.^[2] 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 words 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."^[4]