That is the usual error. The one exception was when I encountered someone trying to get a minimal Lisp up and running on a microcontroller with no external mem

That is the usual error. The one exception was when I encountered someone trying to get a minimal Lisp up and running on a microcontroller with no external memory bus. We did determine that the micro, with 16K of RAM, was less capable than the 704 that the original LISP was developed on (I could never find specific specs, but it almost certainly had at least a 733 drum, which was 8 kilo-words).