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Xerox/Venue tried porting Interlisp (the Lisp machine environment developed at Xerox PARC) to both Unix workstations and commodity PC hardware, but it doesn't s

by ndiddy 11mo ago

Xerox/Venue tried porting Interlisp (the Lisp machine environment developed at Xerox PARC) to both Unix workstations and commodity PC hardware, but it doesn't seem like that was a commercial success. Venue remained a tiny company providing support to existing Interlisp customers until its head developer died in the late 2000s and they wrapped up operations. The Unix/PC ports seem to have mostly been used as a way to run legacy Interlisp software on newer hardware rather than attracting anyone new to the Lisp machine world. I don't see why Symbolics doing the same thing as Xerox would have produced any different results. The real problem was that investment in expert systems/Lisp dried up as a whole. I don't know whether any of the Lisp vendors could have done anything to combat those market forces.

bigfishrunning 11mo ago
I don't really understand why lisp was so intrinsically tied to expert systems and AI. It seems to me that Scheme (and, to an extent, common lisp or other lisps) are pretty good platforms for experimenting with software ideas; long before Jupiter notebooks existed.
eschaton 11mo ago
The environment lasted a long time as the basis for other Xerox products, such as their office automation system and as a front end for their printing systems. However, it wasn’t so much ported as the virtual machine was. (Just like Symbolics did with OpenGenera on Alpha.) What I’m suggesting is that they could have done a full port to the hardware; OpenGenera is still an Ivory CPU emulator. In 1986-7 you could get an AT-compatible 80386 system running at 16-25MHz that supported 8-32MB of RAM for 10-20% the price of a Symbolics workstation, and while it might not run Lisp quite as fast as a 3600 series system, it would still be fast enough for both deployment and development—and the next generation would run Lisp at comparable performance.

by ndiddy 11mo ago

bigfishrunning 11mo ago

I don't really understand why lisp was so intrinsically tied to expert systems and AI. It seems to me that Scheme (and, to an extent, common lisp or other lisps) are pretty good platforms for experimenting with software ideas; long before Jupiter notebooks existed.

eschaton 11mo ago

The environment lasted a long time as the basis for other Xerox products, such as their office automation system and as a front end for their printing systems. However, it wasn’t so much ported as the virtual machine was. (Just like Symbolics did with OpenGenera on Alpha.) What I’m suggesting is that they could have done a full port to the hardware; OpenGenera is still an Ivory CPU emulator. In 1986-7 you could get an AT-compatible 80386 system running at 16-25MHz that supported 8-32MB of RAM for 10-20% the price of a Symbolics workstation, and while it might not run Lisp quite as fast as a 3600 series system, it would still be fast enough for both deployment and development—and the next generation would run Lisp at comparable performance.