3 ms·
They were not extemely slow compared to contemporary machines. Keep in mind: Lisp Machines were single-user workstations mainly for developers and were develope
by lispm 8y ago
They were not extemely slow compared to contemporary machines. Keep in mind: Lisp Machines were single-user workstations mainly for developers and were developed originally in the end 70s and commercialized in the 80s.
Commercial Lisp Machines (LMI, Symbolics, TI) were basically as fast as contemporary machines 1981-90. Especially for running Lisp. The first systems appeared end 70s and there basically almost no machines like them. LMI and Symbolics machines were basically the first or at least among the first GUI-based workstations in the early 80s. In the mid 80s a Lisp Machine was as fast as the then contemporary machine, but much more extensive in capabilities - which made the hardware very expensive.
In 84 Apple released a Mac with tiny b/w screen, an 8 Mhz 68000, 128kbytes memory, no virtual memory, a floppy drive, no extension cards, no development environment, ...
At that time the Lisp Machine from Symbolics used a 68000 as a frontend processor for its megapixel console, had ethernet, supported several megabytes of RAM, had a dozen of extension slots, had disk drives, tape drives, color graphics options, and an object-oriented OS running with 100+ virtual memory with garbage collection.
At the end of the 80s machines catched up - especially the Unix machines - but they were not dramatically faster for running Lisp. But they allowed machines with less RAM running C code/applications - while RAM was really expensive. Real faster machines appeared in the early 90s, when Lisp Machines were already abandoned and newer Lisp architectures based on Lisp RISC chips were not brought to the market - due to lack of customers interested in expensive niche technologies...
In the end 80s a 68030 wasn't running Lisp faster than a Lisp Machine - basically the same for the usual (micro-) benchmarks. The 68040 in the early 90s was slightly faster, then. Generally the during its lifetime 75-92 the Lisp Machine architectures were not designed for speed, but for other capabilities - they were basically enablers for the first development workstations with able to run large (at that time) software/datasets. A single Macsyma could thrash a timesharing mainframe end 70s, but on a Lisp Machine the user had Macsyma on his 'personal computer' with his/her own 1MB-4MB RAM and his/her own virtual memory.
SGI Machines in the mid-80s used Motorola processors - thus weren't 'extremely' faster either. The early MIPS processors weren't much faster either - around 1990 SGI introduced cheaper SGI machines with good graphics - but still not with 'extremely' fast CPUs...
- oblio 8y agoHow much did a Lisp Machine cost? With the specs you're listing I imagine it was 10-100x a PC.
- lispm 8y agoWhen we used PCs for AI development in Lisp in the end 80s/early 90s, they were large Compaq PCs with disk, large screen, backup, graphics card, lots of RAM, Lisp license etc. -> 25k$ or more. A Lisp Machine new in 1984 would be around 80k$. Prices were then coming down a bit for delivery systems and also for embedded boards. But you could think that end of 80s a large Lisp Workstation was three times as expensive as a high-end PC or Mac. But for PCs RAM was still expensive and the 32bit Intel processor wasn't really that good running Lisp. RISC systems (SPARC, MIPS, ALPHA, ...) were better at that and their Lisp systems were better than the ones for PCs. But the real good Lisp systems (Allegro CL, LispWorks, Lucid CL) for RISC appeared or matured only end 80s/early 90s. 64bit Intel is okay nowadays, too. Some Lisp systems were also stretching PC/Workstation capabilities, since they were large memory-hungry applications - they triggered specific bugs in larger configurations. Imagine in the early 90s a CAD system written in Lisp running in hundreds of MBs of RAM, where each CAD workplace cost 1-2 million... stuff like that used by FORD for example to design cars...
- oblio 8y agoWith the cheapest one being 3x the cost of high-end PCs (so not the average PCs, which were and are the majority of PCs sold), the economics kind of say why Lisp Machine didn't fare that well. If I have to pay 3-5-10x of an already expensive PC for the average person, that thing'd better be life changing amazing.
- lispm 8y agoThere were cheaper machines. But generally I would guess all in all it were 2 times the cost of a PC. Symbolics also sold a development environment for Windows (called CLOE) and Lisp Machines on boards for Macs and SUNs. TI had a board for Macs too, but TI left the market end 80s very quickly. Symbolics then was also developing a virtual Lisp Machine - an emulator running on 64bit DEC Alpha machines - the software did cost around $5k later. But keep in mind when PCs became viable for Lisp development on a comparable level, it was already end 80s. Something like a Mac IIx from end 88 was not faster and came with a 40MB Disk. I got a used Lisp Machine from 1986 which had a 600MB disk drive - the drive alone was more expensive than 2 Mac IIx machines. When research labs bought machines like such a Lisp Machine in 1982 for 100k$, they were basically ten years ahead of the market. When budget for these projects were shrinking and the competition was catching up (first RISC Unix workstations and then high-end PCs) it was already endgame time. Additionally companies moved some Lisp software away to C++ - because C++ applications were usually thought to use less system resources at application runtime.