3 ms·
Every time I see this (it's been posted a few times) I'm surprised that this architecture was designed so memory limited (26 bit addressing) and with a big pena
by pinewurst 8y ago
Every time I see this (it's been posted a few times) I'm surprised that this architecture was designed so memory limited (26 bit addressing) and with a big penalty for IEEE floating point. The need to transcend both these limitations was pretty obvious at that time or so I remember. If LMI had continued in business along with the Lisp Machine gravy train, I can't imagine choosing a K-machine over a Symbolics 36xx and/or its 40-bit follow-on (which wasn't that much later).
It's another subject, but I think there's a bit of a Stallman-esque glorification of LMI when they never seemed to go anywhere nor were Lambda machines that appealing IMHO.
- lispm 8y agoLMI had some interesting hardware: the were one of the first users of the NuBUS (which was later used in a smaller version in the Mac II by Apple) and they had Lisp Machines with several CPU boards: these used the infrastructure of a single machine, but each board could run its Lisp independently. TI bought/licensed the technology from LMI and then developed a bunch of interesting machines, like: Lisp Machines with embedded Unix system running on its own 68020 and communicating via a 68010, the first commercial Lisp Microprocessor (a 32bit chip), compact Lisp workstations using that chip, a NuBUS board for the Mac II based on their Lisp chip, ...
- classichasclass 8y agoThere was also the Symbolics MacIvory. I've got one of those in a IIci.
- lispm 8y agoThe Symbolics MacIvory is a bit more complex, since it is a 40bit machine and also uses 48bit ECC memory.