To your first point, that depends on your target architecture. On a Symbolics (and TI Explorer, LMI, Xerox D-machine, etc), there is no Unix-ish "asm layer" co

To your first point, that depends on your target architecture. On a Symbolics (and TI Explorer, LMI, Xerox D-machine, etc), there is no Unix-ish "asm layer" communicating that last inch to the bare metal. The "assembly language" of these was Lisp primitives and once the microcode loaded, it was all lisp from there. In fact, on the Xerox D-machines you loaded one microcode and got a Lisp machine, a different microcode and got a Smalltalk machine, or a Mesa/Cedar machine. Nifty stuff, from The Before Time, when we were still fundamentally innovating hardware architectures and not figuring out how to make x86 go faster. Definitely with you on the second point.