> It was also found in the 80s that any operating system written in LISP was dog slow. Lisp Machine operating systems were written in the mid 70s - developed f

> It was also found in the 80s that any operating system written in LISP was dog slow. Lisp Machine operating systems were written in the mid 70s - developed for a new breed of computers: single user workstations with graphical user interfaces. They were developed at Xerox PARC and at the MIT AI Lab. > They even started making dedicated hardware interpreters of LISP to try and get around this. The machines were built to get around slow Lisp systems on time-shared computers with tiny memory. They wanted to have dedicated machines with memory exclusive memory for that one user. A bunch of stuff was then invented for those systems, including better automatic memory management like generational garbage collectors. Around 1980 (!) such machines were extremely expensive and still had tiny hardware: around 1 MB RAM and approaching 1 VAX MIPS of speed. Mid/end 80s they had 20 MB RAM and 5 MIPS... No wonder: an entirely new class of systems was developed on the slow hardware of the time.