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In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086. Part of what killed it, besides not having the economy of scale in microp
by tlb 1y ago
In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086.
Part of what killed it, besides not having the economy of scale in microprocessors, is that optimizing compilers got good at turning loops over integers into fast code for regular CPUs, and these are pretty important for overall system performance. So no matter how much faster a custom CPU could run eval, it wasn't going to be competitive at integer loops.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086. Unlikely. For this to happen, the developers would have had to target the mass market (i.e. working hard to make the processor and a computer based on it rather cheaply available for the masses). This is clearly not what SCHEME-78 was developed for.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoProgrammers may have wanted to program in other languages but users wanted speed. People were already buying computers that cost more than cars and they ran like molasses. You have to deliver what customers want on their terms, not program on your own terms.
- kjs3 1y agousers wanted speed I'd argue users wanted off the shelf software, not bespoke solutions, which is why they were cool with slow machines that ran 123, dBase and Wordperfect.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoI don't know what you're trying to say here, all those programs would have run terribly if they were written in lisp or scheme.
- pjmlp 1y agoCompiled languages with automatic memory management were already a thing in 16 bit home computers, and they run fast enough for boring data entry business software, e.g. anything xBASE, compiled BASIC. Anything to do with graphics and games, yes only Assembly would do the trick.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoJust word processors and spreadsheets were not fast enough for general use in the 80's. Everyone was mostly exited for making them faster, not for graphics and games.
- pjmlp 1y agoStill, not all of them were fully written in Assembly, like games and graphics. I was there, and wrote my share of Clipper and DBase III code, among many other things.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoYou think hit software back then was written in basic or anything close to scheme? DBase was written in assembly first, word perfect was written in assembly first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
- pjmlp 1y agoYes, DBase was written in Assembly, like many compilers and interpreters back then, and I am certain you would be able to dig out a Lisp or Scheme compiler for CP/M equally written in Assembly. Yet, the folks down at the bank, insurance companies, and video rentals, were using DBase applications written in xBase, compiled via Clipper, not Assembly. My first computer was a Timex 2068, I kind of know what was being written with what.
- 1y ago
- goalieca 1y agoWhat I remember from the 80s/90s is that computer speed was never fast enough to keep up with use cases. Users really did want speed and marketers focused on speed.
- kjs3 1y agoComputers are still never fast enough. But for 95% of users, if you said "you can have a computer that's 5x as fast, but won't run any of the software you use every day", they'd pass.
- CyberDildonics 1y agolisp machines would have been slow, expensive and not run any software.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoHad these been picked for the IBM PC, it would have died and been replaced by some RISC. Lisp machines only made any sense in that very brief window when DRAM was faster than the CPUs that used it. Partly because of process technology, partly because of lack of understanding of CPU design principles. With x86, you could choose to ignore the parts of the design that made it slow, and just build on the basics to bring the design forward. With a lisp machine, that would have never worked. It wouldn't have been long until you would have been able to buy machines that would have been more than 10x faster on real workloads, and probably cheaper too.
- pjmlp 1y agoMost likely the IBM PC would have died had it not been for the way clones came to be.
- empw 1y agoMaybe that's true for this project (implementing pointer chasing list interpreter directly in hardware), but it's much less clear to me why it would be true of the much more commonly remembered examples of "lisp machines" like symbolics, TI, etc.
- kjs3 1y agoI think it's a little more than that. The Lisp machines were very expensive (though the single chip version made things like a MacIvory or MicroExplorer somewhat more affordable), very proprietary, and generally didn't run the software the mass market was looking for (not that they couldn't...there just was never a Lotus-123 or Wordstar for Symbolics). So there was probably never a path to real economy of scale. But otherwise I think you're spot on, and it's a common arc in this industry: company comes up with a true innovation solving a problem better than the competitors, Moores law does it's thing, suddenly the COTS products are competitive through brute force if nothing else at a lower price point, and company either has to innovate again or embrace a COTS platform. Jim Gettys wrote a neat paper about how this effected high-end video cards back in the early X11 days (admittedly, no longer directly applicable since GPUs are the COTS solution now, but the principle stands).