One road not taken would have been to port the MIT/LMI/TI Lisp Machine software to stock hardware, it was 32-bit until the end so didn't need an Alpha as the ho

One road not taken would have been to port the MIT/LMI/TI Lisp Machine software to stock hardware, it was 32-bit until the end so didn't need an Alpha as the host. A fast 68020 with a custom MMU would have been fine. There was only around 12k of "assembler" to rewrite to provide the VM and simple RTOS.