Also, Symbolics, LMI and TI all faced the big problem that their machines were in the $100K range, which was too much except for well-funded ARPA projects or bi

Also, Symbolics, LMI and TI all faced the big problem that their machines were in the $100K range, which was too much except for well-funded ARPA projects or big-company research groups. (E.g., I was one of the original system hackers at the Schlumberger/Fairchild AI Lab in 1980, and, with Schlumberger's deep pockets, we bought several Symbolics machines.) The newly-appearing general-purpose workstations (more like $10-15K) from Sun and Apollo ate their lunch, since you "can't bet against the desktop." I.e., no one ultimately wants to share hardware (which is also what killed the DEC VAX and special-purpose minisupercomputers like the Multiflow VLIW machines we built in the early 80's).