"Everything I've been able to learn about the language is that it was designed for a non-register based hardware that never caught on" That's a silly thing to

"Everything I've been able to learn about the language is that it was designed for a non-register based hardware that never caught on" That's a silly thing to say, especially when two of Lisp's primitive operations, CAR and CDR, are literally named after IBM 704's registers and the first implementations were done on register-based hardware (IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers).