3 ms·

I agree w.r.t. the 1970s, but the Lisp Machines were having cost-competition issues even before the Intel/SPARC machines caught up, due to the advent of lower-c

by mjn 13y ago

I agree w.r.t. the 1970s, but the Lisp Machines were having cost-competition issues even before the Intel/SPARC machines caught up, due to the advent of lower-cost, smallish minicomputers that could be used as single-user machines if you had the budget. By 1985 you could get a MicroVAX II for ~$20k, plus another ~$8k for a copy of VAX Lisp, and have a quite reasonable Lisp system, with the downside of having to store a reasonably big cabinet (but not full-VAX kind of big).

lispm 13y ago
The basic MicroVAX II was quite slow, with tiny memory, just a text terminal interface, ... To get anything comparable to a Symbolics 3640 one would have to invest quite a bit more money and it would still be slower as an 11/780. The lab at our University was using a lot of Lisp on a DEC 10 and VAX 11/750 and 11/780. Nobody I know was keen to move their Lisp development to a Microvax (though there were some), There were some Symbolics 3640 users. Then later Apollo/SUN/Compaq/Mac II, ...