> As I understand it (and this is before my time), garbage collection in lisp languages was really a downer on 70s and even 80s era hardware. It mostly was. Th

> As I understand it (and this is before my time), garbage collection in lisp languages was really a downer on 70s and even 80s era hardware. It mostly was. The main reasons were that GC lacked necessary features and memory was extremely small&expensive. The first really usable GCs arrived with processors like the 68020+MMU or the 68030. Even on a Lisp Machine the GC got much more usable with the introduction of the ephemeral GC, which used hardware support to track memory changes in RAM. As soon as the GC needed to work on virtual memory on disk, it was much slower.