This statement is ridiculous. Symbolics is dead for a number of reasons, but Stallman's Emacs isn't one of them. Stallman copied some of the features in Zmacs.

This statement is ridiculous. Symbolics is dead for a number of reasons, but Stallman's Emacs isn't one of them. Stallman copied some of the features in Zmacs. Zmacs was one small part of a much larger operating system which, among other things, included industry leading animation software. There were many, many systems (including the hardware architecture itself) that Stallman could not, and did not copy. No company picked an alternative to Lisp Machines simply because it also had something that looked like Zmacs. Your statement is akin to saying that a modern tablet with a web browser makes desktops (which can run much more powerful tools) obsolete. Symbolics got used to selling hardware for tens of thousands of dollars and could not fully adjust when competitors were eventually able to sell machines for much less. The company also had a couple of bad CEOs, and suffered large financial losses because of a series of bad real estate deals. Efforts to port their software to other platforms were largely unsuccessful. Lisp Machines were always a niche market because they were expensive, top-of-the-line machines. The target market never really overlapped with Windows. Cheap workstations that could have multiple users eventually became almost as capable as Lisp Machines and thus displaced them. If you want to credit Stallman with sabotage then mention Elisp, because Elisp is the worst Lisp still in use (Zmacs ran ZetaLisp).