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I don't think so. Their hardware was the better thing. What they should have done is cannibalise themselves. Something extremely difficult, but it could be don

I don't think so. Their hardware was the better thing. What they should have done is cannibalise themselves. Something extremely difficult, but it could be done. Fairchild did that with the integrated circuit. There was a coup inside from the people that wanted to kill the IC and stay selling expensive in small quantities instead of going to earning way less per unit en masse.

nxobject 3y ago
That's an interesting possibility to think about. What do you think they could have done that involved hardware? I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window. Perhaps they could have stuck with that: I could see SGI workstations with Symbolics coprocessor boards leveraging the foothold they had in 3D graphics and animation, for example. Or a RAD development environment for technical computing on NeXT computers offloading hard symbolic computations as needed, since NeXT had high-end RAD as their selling point.
- lispm 3y ago
  > but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window One could use a NuVista graphics board and Genera could use that directly. One could also put several UX400 / UX1200 boards into a single SUN using its VMEbus.
- mepian 3y ago
  I've seen mentions of Symbolics working on an SGI board but I’m not sure if they ever released that. At least they released a board for another Unix workstation vendor, Sun.
  - lispm 3y ago
    There was also an article mentioning a possible version for Sony News systems. On SGI it seemed that (later?) several 3d graphics applications used Allegro CL -> perhaps that was powerful enough. For Symbolics to really make sense of SGIs would have made it necessary to tap into the graphics hardware&software from the embedded Ivory boards.
- simne 3y ago
  > That's an interesting possibility to think about [skip] > I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus That is answer. Mini-computers first appear as cheap alternatives to mainframes, where was impossible to just connect client by leased line. Micro-computers created, when semiconductors grow to stage, when could put whole CPU on one die, so they just substituted mini's. At first, semiconductors don't allow to put numeric coprocessor on same die with CPU, so short time existed wonders like Weitek, but when first RISC appeared, already existed i486 with integrated coprocessor, so discrete coprocessor was already not viable economically. Yes, much later appear ccNUMA (cache bus with cross-bar switch interconnect), but it's complexity IMHO close to coprocessor, so it became viable on very large scale, I think 16 cores or more.

nxobject 3y ago

That's an interesting possibility to think about. What do you think they could have done that involved hardware? I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window. Perhaps they could have stuck with that: I could see SGI workstations with Symbolics coprocessor boards leveraging the foothold they had in 3D graphics and animation, for example. Or a RAD development environment for technical computing on NeXT computers offloading hard symbolic computations as needed, since NeXT had high-end RAD as their selling point.

lispm 3y ago
> but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window One could use a NuVista graphics board and Genera could use that directly. One could also put several UX400 / UX1200 boards into a single SUN using its VMEbus.
mepian 3y ago
I've seen mentions of Symbolics working on an SGI board but I’m not sure if they ever released that. At least they released a board for another Unix workstation vendor, Sun.
- lispm 3y ago
  There was also an article mentioning a possible version for Sony News systems. On SGI it seemed that (later?) several 3d graphics applications used Allegro CL -> perhaps that was powerful enough. For Symbolics to really make sense of SGIs would have made it necessary to tap into the graphics hardware&software from the embedded Ivory boards.
simne 3y ago
> That's an interesting possibility to think about [skip] > I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus That is answer. Mini-computers first appear as cheap alternatives to mainframes, where was impossible to just connect client by leased line. Micro-computers created, when semiconductors grow to stage, when could put whole CPU on one die, so they just substituted mini's. At first, semiconductors don't allow to put numeric coprocessor on same die with CPU, so short time existed wonders like Weitek, but when first RISC appeared, already existed i486 with integrated coprocessor, so discrete coprocessor was already not viable economically. Yes, much later appear ccNUMA (cache bus with cross-bar switch interconnect), but it's complexity IMHO close to coprocessor, so it became viable on very large scale, I think 16 cores or more.