3 ms·

So, nothing to do with lisp-based microprocessor chips. Got it.

• pjmlp 1y ago
  So, nothing to contribute to the conversation of Lisp based workstations. Point taken.
• kragen 1y ago
  While the Alto and Dorado weren't microprocessors, a couple of years after the Dorado they could have been. And there was a period of time when RISC processors were wasting their potential advantage of running user code at microcode-like one-cycle-per-instruction speeds by not including any instruction cache, as Alan Kay has argued on Quora. If Chuck Thacker had gone to work at Motorola or National and gotten free rein to build a Dorado microprocessor, it would have kicked butt. Also, Superman would beat Spider-Man. But Xerox wasn't organized to sell even microcomputers, much less microprocessors, so it would have had to be another company that did it. Motorola, say, or Apple, but although they flirted with doing their own processor for the Lisa, they didn't do it in real life until maybe the Mac M1. (PowerPC and Newton ARM weren't really Apple designs.) The Scheme chip is pretty different from the Dorado or from the Symbolics processors, which at the time also weren't microprocessors. But I think it's a mistake to think they had nothing to do with each other.