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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.
by 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.