I'm far from an expert, but I've definitely heard mention of those things. I think what makes us non-Lispers romanticize the Lisp machine isn't that it ran Lis

I'm far from an expert, but I've definitely heard mention of those things. I think what makes us non-Lispers romanticize the Lisp machine isn't that it ran Lisp per se or even a high level language. It's the Aston Martin flavor of a machine built to be one comprehensive whole by people who understood all the layers and wanted a coherent machine in toto. We still crave these things, and there's something vaguely upsetting about knowing that (for instance) one's Smalltalk image is running within a Unix environment and not natively, even though in practice it's better this way.