4 ms·

I worked in an expert systems company in the 80s (one mentioned in the Phillips thesis referenced in the danweinreb article). Take all this with a dose of IIRC

I worked in an expert systems company in the 80s (one mentioned in the Phillips thesis referenced in the danweinreb article). Take all this with a dose of IIRC. As part of out work, we evaluated and benchmarked Xerox Interlisp machines, Symbolics systems, VAXen, later Gold Hill etc. to find a cost-effective delivery platform. We even eventually funded the development of a delivery-focused subset of Common Lisp. One aspect that Symbolics didn't seem to understand back then was cost of entry and deployment: the Xerox D-machines were (IIRC) around 1/3 the cost of the Symbolics. Perhaps not as speedy, but adequate for our day-to-day development work as well as for the end customer's needs. Symbolics had great development systems, but the delivery answers were late in coming; too late to help us. There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations, but the margins here are too small to contain it....

rjsw 13y ago
Your memory of the costs of the systems is fine. I couldn't afford a Lisp Machine, I just used Franz Lisp on an Atari ST.
qohen 13y ago
There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2]. (Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environment is covered in the "Into the Ground: C++" chapter). There's some interesting history there (and the rest of the book is probably worth reading as well for a variety of reasons). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel [2] http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
- lispm 13y ago
  Lucid CL was a very nice implementation. Maintenance is still available for it. It's now called Liquid CL and maintenance comes from the LispWorks guys. Lucid took the money they earned and invested it into some ill-fated and ill-designed C++ environment. Lisp competitors from that time, Franz Inc. and LispWorks are still in business.
jff 13y ago
You did benchmarking so you may be able to confirm/deny this: I've heard that Lisp machines went out of favor because Lisp just ran faster on a VAX. Was this the case?
- hga 13y ago
  Besides horrible management---echoing Zigurd, a friend and contemporary, I was at one point reliably told that manufacturing, R&D and marketing were paying no attention to each other, such that manufacturing had built a factory that couldn't make the latest hardware R&D had developed, which was done completely independently of what marketing thought was needed---they were killed by non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. Basically they couldn't amortize the NRE for their custom hardware and later most especially chips (from memory, first, a chipset that spread the CPU across several chips, rather like the one Western Digital did that among other things enabled the LSI-11, then of course an all in one chip) across the huge number of units that Intel and Motorola sold. They also canceled their RISC rethink of their basic low level architecture on the day it was supposed to tape out; don't know if it had a low enough gate count to be like the first SPARC processor, which was implemented on 2 20,000 gate arrays, one for the CPU and one for the floating point unit (gate arrays are all alike until a few layers of metal are put on top). So soon enough you could run a full Common Lisp, almost certainly without as much run-time error checking, faster on cheap commodity hardware than on a Lisp Machine. Something like that seems to have happened to Azul Systems, which apparently isn't developing any new hardware, but is selling their version of the HotSpot JVM to run on x86_64 hardware. A prior generation of their pauseless GC (vs. 1 second per GiB, a big deal if your heap is 100s of GiB) required a software write or read barrier that cost ~20% of performance (all this from memory). It's likely that soon enough, even if it perhaps ran slower than their custom hardware, it was a lot cheaper to run it on commodity Intel/AMD hardware.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    I can't find a reference for this, but I seem to recall that Azul uses virtualization features of modern CPUs to decrease the read-barrier overhead; if that is correct, then that's a case of the general-purpose hardware fortuitously getting features to out-compete special-purpose hardware.

rjsw 13y ago

Your memory of the costs of the systems is fine. I couldn't afford a Lisp Machine, I just used Franz Lisp on an Atari ST.

qohen 13y ago

There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2]. (Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environment is covered in the "Into the Ground: C++" chapter). There's some interesting history there (and the rest of the book is probably worth reading as well for a variety of reasons). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel [2] http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf

lispm 13y ago
Lucid CL was a very nice implementation. Maintenance is still available for it. It's now called Liquid CL and maintenance comes from the LispWorks guys. Lucid took the money they earned and invested it into some ill-fated and ill-designed C++ environment. Lisp competitors from that time, Franz Inc. and LispWorks are still in business.

jff 13y ago

You did benchmarking so you may be able to confirm/deny this: I've heard that Lisp machines went out of favor because Lisp just ran faster on a VAX. Was this the case?

hga 13y ago
Besides horrible management---echoing Zigurd, a friend and contemporary, I was at one point reliably told that manufacturing, R&D and marketing were paying no attention to each other, such that manufacturing had built a factory that couldn't make the latest hardware R&D had developed, which was done completely independently of what marketing thought was needed---they were killed by non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. Basically they couldn't amortize the NRE for their custom hardware and later most especially chips (from memory, first, a chipset that spread the CPU across several chips, rather like the one Western Digital did that among other things enabled the LSI-11, then of course an all in one chip) across the huge number of units that Intel and Motorola sold. They also canceled their RISC rethink of their basic low level architecture on the day it was supposed to tape out; don't know if it had a low enough gate count to be like the first SPARC processor, which was implemented on 2 20,000 gate arrays, one for the CPU and one for the floating point unit (gate arrays are all alike until a few layers of metal are put on top). So soon enough you could run a full Common Lisp, almost certainly without as much run-time error checking, faster on cheap commodity hardware than on a Lisp Machine. Something like that seems to have happened to Azul Systems, which apparently isn't developing any new hardware, but is selling their version of the HotSpot JVM to run on x86_64 hardware. A prior generation of their pauseless GC (vs. 1 second per GiB, a big deal if your heap is 100s of GiB) required a software write or read barrier that cost ~20% of performance (all this from memory). It's likely that soon enough, even if it perhaps ran slower than their custom hardware, it was a lot cheaper to run it on commodity Intel/AMD hardware.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  I can't find a reference for this, but I seem to recall that Azul uses virtualization features of modern CPUs to decrease the read-barrier overhead; if that is correct, then that's a case of the general-purpose hardware fortuitously getting features to out-compete special-purpose hardware.