4 ms·
The Lisp Machines? They sold a few of them, but they ultimately weren't commercially successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedi
by zhemao 13y ago
The Lisp Machines? They sold a few of them, but they ultimately weren't commercially successful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
It would be interesting to see how to implement a Lisp machine for the modern day. For it to be useful, it should support some sorts of parallel-processing capabilities that conventional CPUs don't have. Perhaps pmap and preduce as SIMD instructions.
- lispm 13y agoI wouldn't say they were not commercially successful. In their market they must have generated sales of hard- and software of a billion dollars (dollars of the 80s). Was the Commodore C64 not successful, just because it is no longer used? > For it to be useful, it should support some sorts of parallel-processing capabilities that conventional CPUs don't have. Perhaps pmap and preduce as SIMD instructions. A Lisp Machine can be useful without that or with different architectures. In those days there were quite a few attempts to speed up Lisp. Thinking Machines sold the ultimate Lisp accelerator: the Connection Machine. Stuff like that was mind-blowing and mind-blowing expensive. Remember, a useful Lisp Machine in the early 90s had a 40 Mhz cpu with 40bit architecture, a graphics accelerator for a second screen, 40 or more megabytes of memory, a 400 MB disk, 10Mbit/sec Ethernet, 5 Mbit/sec SCSI, ... Today we get already multiples of those numbers for tiny money and a 64bit processor. Lisp runs nicely when implemented natively.