Also, once the Symbolics 3600 series was released in the early 1980s, Symbolics looked like they were just resting on their laurels relative to the rest of the

Also, once the Symbolics 3600 series was released in the early 1980s, Symbolics looked like they were just resting on their laurels relative to the rest of the industry. There weren’t binary-compatible performance improvements every year or two like the rest of the workstation industry was seeing, it took the rest of the decade to achieve that kind of improvement, and with only source compatibility, in the form of the XL series. To do a bit of an apples to apples comparison, look at the Apollo and Sun workstation lines versus the Symbolics workstation line from 1983/4-1991/2. That takes you from the Apollo DN300, SUN-1, and Symbolics 3600, through the Apollo DN10000, Sun SPARCstation 2, and Symbolics XL1200. They all started at about 1 MIPS but ended at very different positions.