You can find videos of the machines in use online. This was in 1985. The Symbolics machines did not have any special 3D hardware. The SGI boxes were the first

You can find videos of the machines in use online. This was in 1985. The Symbolics machines did not have any special 3D hardware. The SGI boxes were the first to do so. The Symbolics did have a "high resolution" (around 1K pixels across) b&w bit mapped monitor with a windowing system and reasonably fast bitblt (copying of pixel areas) which made it possible to do simple wireframe animations. In addition my machine had a second color frame buffer with 24-bit color, a rarity at the time which allowed me to develop my first 3D renderer. Lisp machines were marketed as productivity enhancers with an emphasis on (old fashioned) AI. Expert systems and such. They were more complex pieces of hardware design than the emerging Sun workstations which ran Unix, and consequently more expensive. A while after I graduated, Symbolics released their own suite of 3D applications (S-Geometry & co) which for a while were the best commercial packages out there, probably until around 1988 when Softimage was released on SGI machines (I developed their animation code). I wrote about some of this in a series of blog postings: https://medium.com/@kaveh808/5-zetalisp-and-the-talking-heads-888376cd38a7 https://medium.com/@kaveh808/5-zetalisp-and-the-talking-head...