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LISP was implemented on the PDP-1 in the early sixties - originally it was implemented for the IBM 704 in 1959. C was implemented on a larger machine, the PDP-
by lispm 8y ago
LISP was implemented on the PDP-1 in the early sixties - originally it was implemented for the IBM 704 in 1959. C was implemented on a larger machine, the PDP-11 in the early 70s. There were LISP implementations for the PDP-11 - Richard Stallman himself wrote one.
One of the problems was that LISP was not friendly to timesharing, since a LISP program could take over the whole RAM and something like GC would walk over lots of memory, which meant lots of slow memory swapping in machines with virtual memory. It was then best to use LISP when alone on such a machine.
- yogthos 8y agoI'm well aware of the origins of LISP, but reality is that C model is much closer to hardware architecture used in commodity hardware at the time. C made a lot of sense under the constraints, and that's the reason it became popular.
- lispm 8y agoOther than what you wrote, LISP did not need 'super computers'. It ran on the same and smaller machines as the original C. A PDP-1 was never a 'super computer', neither were the other PDPs. They were 'minicomputers' or 'mainframes'. Actually super computers (CDC, Cray, ...) were not a particular popular target for LISP implementations, ...
- yogthos 8y agoFair point, you didn't actually need super computers to run LISP.