
History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007) - kristianp
https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/
======
pholloway83
My uncle was one of the founders. My dad had a lisp machine in his home office
for years. I never got to use it much, but I certainly spent a lot of time
programming in LISP as a teenager.

I should see if my dad still has it, curious if it would still work?

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svat
Correction to the date in the title: this is a concatenation of blog posts
from 2007 (not 2017). Specifically, these three posts:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120909104608/http://danweinreb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120909104608/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi) (Sunday, November
11th, 2007)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120909104443/http://danweinreb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120909104443/http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-
did-symbolics-fail) (Friday, November 16th, 2007)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120909110022/http://danweinreb....](http://web.archive.org/web/20120909110022/http://danweinreb.org/blog/15)
(Friday, December 21st, 2007)

There is other interesting stuff on that blog and in the comments etc.

Dan Weinreb died in 2012:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Weinreb&ol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Weinreb&oldid=838230506)

~~~
sctb
Thanks! We've updated the headline.

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peter303
Most special purpose machines failed because it took 2-5 years to engineer and
produce each new generation of hardware. In the meantime generation purpose
machines like Intel or Motorola CPUs came out every 6-12 months. An early 10x
price/performance od special over general lead would evaporate next special
iteration cycle. I saw this happen in LISP machines, massively parallel
processors, array processors, etc. throughout the 1980s. My university lab
acquired a FPS, MassPar, Connection Machine, Silicon Graphics only to see
general purpose catch up.

All the fancy hardware and firmware tricks to accelerate LISP could be
emulated in faster in software after a few new CPU generations.

Eventually a nimble company like Nvidia found a good mix of generallity and
specificity to succeed. The semi-standard ARM specifications are another way
the mobile computing world stayed in the semi-custom game.

~~~
lispm
I don't think they failed. They had served well in a time window from early
70s to the end 80s or even 90. In the US much of the stuff was research and
development, and a lot was paid by DARPA (the defense research agency). For
example something like a LISP Machine was originally not developed as a fast
Lisp system. It was in the mid 70s the dream of a computer for software
development in Artificial Intelligence. The bottleneck was not so much
processor speed, but memory and that computers were shared with people on
time-sharing systems. 1 MB RAM and 50 users. The system speed was the problem
- not the processor speed. The Lisp Machine was designed as a single-user
workstation with GUI - in mid 70s. Since the researchers wanted them for Lisp
and they mostly knew Lisp, they also wrote the OS and the design software (for
example chip design) in Lisp.

A commercialized GUI computer like Mac from 1984 was a tiny machine without
development tools: floppy drives, 128k memory and a tiny screen.

That stock hardware was eventually faster was no surprise, since a) Lisp
processors were not particular fast and b) people did run simpler Lisp
software on those - mostly applications, but not a Lisp OS, which was no
longer needed. The Lisp processor made it faster to develop code.

One of the main purposes was to be technology accelerators in the cold war of
the 70s/80s - up to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

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nigwil_
The link in one of the posts to the Eve Phillips Masters’ thesis is now:
[https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-
info/ai-b...](https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/ai-
business.pdf)

~~~
ScottBurson
Here's the “Symbolics, Inc: A failure of heterogeneous engineering” paper:
[https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-
info/Symb...](https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-
info/Symbolics.pdf)

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timonoko
This machine aged fast. I had one in 1986
[https://youtu.be/P96Lp3MAJJ4?t=9m](https://youtu.be/P96Lp3MAJJ4?t=9m) for
personal use and I never really understood the purpose of this machine. It was
not particularly fast compared to lisps in other machines.

~~~
lispm
If you compared the 3640 using low-level Lisp benchmarks, it was comparable to
other similar expensive machines at that time.

The difference was mainly that it allowed you to write large Lisp programs
inside a large Lisp IDE on top of a Lisp operating system. Unix-based Common
Lisp IDEs were just appearing or about to appear in 1986 and large Lisps under
Unix was still a challenge - for example when using GC and a large amount of
virtual memory.

Your 3640 was basically second generation hardware. First were the CADR and
then the initial 36 __range. Later generations were slightly faster, supported
newer hardware (SCSI, NuBUS, VMEbus, ...) and could be embedded into other
machines (like the UX boards for SUNs or the MacIvory boards for Macs).

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pholloway83
For an interesting read from the MIT AI lab crowd check out this book:

[http://www.blurb.com/b/2172660-minskys-trinskys-3rd-
edition](http://www.blurb.com/b/2172660-minskys-trinskys-3rd-edition)

