Regarding the graphics, the whole lisp thing did not take off is what I think happened. When Symbolics began there was a lot of excitement - them, MIT, LMI, Xer

Regarding the graphics, the whole lisp thing did not take off is what I think happened. When Symbolics began there was a lot of excitement - them, MIT, LMI, Xerox, even VAX early on. But it did not really catch-on, some of that was because of fighting about the code between Symbolics, MIT, and LMI that held it back. So when Symbolics had good stuff, it was pretty much just them at that point cause they had won the fights and unix vendors were coming along. So for their price you could get a few Sun boxes say, and you could have a few users on it. Genera was terrible about that. You could only have one user logged in at a time and that guy could change anything in the OS or programs however he felt, and then the next guy has no idea why everything is different. Basically the graphics stuff was for effects and animation, and that did well for a while, but it was so alien to what everyone else was doing at that point, no other vendors could really make sofware easily portable between Genera and other hardware/OSes. So they did not and the S- software was really expensive route, it made the most sense to run it on VMs in OSF/1 of all things! The other angle they could have exploited was CAD, but again Genera was the thorn. There was no way a Pro/E or anything of that sort would make it. The C on Symbolics was some strange half dynamic thing with GC implemented in lisp. Again just so alien. Essentially Dassault made a CAD (ICAD?) for it and that was it. But it was sort of ahead of it's time (there are now add-ons to all the CAD software that do similar approach, but back then it was so much like simply drafting on a computer what all the software was doing) and viewed as odd. Again very expensive and with all single user drawbacks, for example AutoCAD on PC and Pro/E on Sun were so much more appealing. And again the whole lisp thing because it was abandoned made it so that even Dassault could never really port it to modern hardware and it was a big expensive golden goose so they tried but eventually killed it and created/bought other products.