It certainly should not be compared with an Apple ][: the last Symbolics machine was introduced in 1992, the NXP1000. They were still adding features and such

It certainly should not be compared with an Apple ][: the last Symbolics machine was introduced in 1992, the NXP1000. They were still adding features and such at that time, and the Apple ][ was long obsolete at that time. There are some enlightening comments from Kent Pitman on comp.lang.lisp, which give a sense of what kinds of features the Lisp machines provided to developers, and why they still haven't been matched by contemporary systems: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/o6CKxgzNLFUJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/o... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/Xz4Mww0ZwLIJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk/X...