5 ms·

I spent a summer with a Symbolics Lisp Machine in 1988. At pretty much every point when Lisp machines were commercially available, they were slower at Lisp task

by spolsky 16y ago

I spent a summer with a Symbolics Lisp Machine in 1988. At pretty much every point when Lisp machines were commercially available, they were slower at Lisp tasks than the generic competition. We couldn't wait to get off of the Symbolics onto generic Sun 4s (with 68020 chips, the same as Macintosh IIs). Lisp machines promised to be unbelievably fast at Lisp because the Lisp interpreter was "in microcode". In reality, the much smaller market for Lisp machines meant that they just weren't developed nearly as quickly as Intel and Motorola were iterating, so by the time they shipped, there were mass market, general purpose CPUs that could interpret Lisp faster than Lisp machines could execute it natively.

swannodette 16y ago
Sorry my point about "excitement" was simply that, computing enthusiasm - not the historical performance of Lisp machine against other hardware architectures of the time.
metageek 16y ago
The Sun/4 was Sparc-based. I remember, because around 1990-91 I was in a department with a mix of Sun/3s and Sun/4s, and the incompatible CPUs were an occasional spot of friction.
kragen 16y ago
A couple of quibbles. First, Sun 4s were SPARCs, not 680x0s. That was the difference between Sun 3s and Sun 4s. Second, it actually took several years from when the first Lisp Machine was completed in 1974 to when the first "generic" workstation was available in 1982, the year after Lisp machines became commercially available. It took several more years for Lucid Common Lisp and other such standard-CPU Lisps to improve their performance to the point where they were competitive with the specialized hardware. The exact crossover point depended on your application. I think that by 1988 CISCy LispMs were a clear dead end for high-performance computing, along with every other 1970s architecture except the 360. The folks at Symbolics didn't think so, and kept designing and shipping new Ivory hardware for the next four years, but I think people were only buying them because of Genera.

by spolsky 16y ago

swannodette 16y ago

Sorry my point about "excitement" was simply that, computing enthusiasm - not the historical performance of Lisp machine against other hardware architectures of the time.

metageek 16y ago

The Sun/4 was Sparc-based. I remember, because around 1990-91 I was in a department with a mix of Sun/3s and Sun/4s, and the incompatible CPUs were an occasional spot of friction.

kragen 16y ago

A couple of quibbles. First, Sun 4s were SPARCs, not 680x0s. That was the difference between Sun 3s and Sun 4s. Second, it actually took several years from when the first Lisp Machine was completed in 1974 to when the first "generic" workstation was available in 1982, the year after Lisp machines became commercially available. It took several more years for Lucid Common Lisp and other such standard-CPU Lisps to improve their performance to the point where they were competitive with the specialized hardware. The exact crossover point depended on your application. I think that by 1988 CISCy LispMs were a clear dead end for high-performance computing, along with every other 1970s architecture except the 360. The folks at Symbolics didn't think so, and kept designing and shipping new Ivory hardware for the next four years, but I think people were only buying them because of Genera.