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I would not call it a complete failure. For example Symbolics created revenue of around 1 billion USD during the years it sold the machines in the 80s. That's q

by lispm 12y ago

I would not call it a complete failure. For example Symbolics created revenue of around 1 billion USD during the years it sold the machines in the 80s. That's quite impressive. A lot of impressive technology had been developed. Eventually the time was over and the technology was replaced. That happened to Apollo, DEC, SUN, Cray, Thinking Machines, SGI, Amiga, ... and a bunch of other tech companies. It was great while it lasted. With the cold war ending (and with it the government spending for military and civilian high-tech shifting) and with more versatile/cheaper technology capturing the market (C++, RISC computers, ...) the time was over. Basically the Lisp Machine tech was ripe for a full reboot (like Steve Jobs did with NeXT, but there was no money for that in the Lisp market anymore). The existing Lisp Machine software was not flexible enough and too limited in its capabilities. Lisp developers might have still like its capabilities, but for the average user/developer, it would have needed to be slimmed down. The emulator needed a DEC Alpha - and not a PC, where it would have found more users and cheaper hardware. Apple tried it with Dylan for mobile and application development, but that never entered the market. The Newton wasn't shipped with Dylan. Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Harlequin tried it with DylanWorks. CMU tried to develop a Dylan environment. More was tried, but most failed.

pjmlp 12y ago
Personally I think that any of us that used one of those systems can only look at those that insist in doing PDP style programming as living in the pre-history. Environments like modern IDEs and languages like Wolfram might be the way forward to regain what was lost with the demise of Lisp Machines.
hga 12y ago
Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Nope, it turned out the "business" person/people who arranged the contracts for OEM sales of Lucid's Lisp did them as essentially loans, against the OEM's actual sales as I recall, and when they came due Lucid's investors felt that the success of Energize was sufficiently iffy the extra investment was not worth it. Details can be found on Richard Gabriel's web site: http://dreamsongs.com/ http://dreamsongs.com/ In general my take on what happened is somewhat different. It starts from the observation that when the Lisp Machine was developed, there was a great deal to be said for a custom TTL processor laser focused on Lisp. It was a good way to squeeze a lot of performance out of the available technology, pretty much the only way unless you were crazy enough to try to do it in ECL. And people could see the utility of what became the engineering workstation from the success of Xerox's Alto (which added graphics to NLS). As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. LMI didn't have the capital to do so, in fact, TI bailed them out and invested in them just to keep the company alive so they could do their own gate array Lisp Machine, the TI Explorer. Don't know what happened with TI, but LMI was eventually killed by Canadian politics. Symbolics was very badly managed by then, and continued to make a number of very bad decisions. And then, going back to Gabriel, there's the whole worse is better thesis. Worse is better seems to have fantastically greater survival characteristics, in fact, nowadays the only wildly successful The Right Thing software ecosystem is Java.... If there's such a strong ... force, if you will, against the approach of Lisp and therefore Lisp Machines, then it's hard to see how they could have survived.
- lispm 12y ago
  Not really. Lucid took the money from Lisp sales and invested it into C++. Read it in Gabriel's book. > As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. TI developed a single-chip microprocessor. The later TI Explorer and the MicroExplorer were based on microprocessor CPUs. DARPA financed it for the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. Symbolics did the same - they redid the CPU as a microprocessor, the Symbolics Ivory. Many Symbolics machines were based on that chip: XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, MacIvory 1/2/3 and the NXP1000. Symbolics did three iterations of the CPU and had a full design of a RISC cpu ready.

by lispm 12y ago

pjmlp 12y ago

Personally I think that any of us that used one of those systems can only look at those that insist in doing PDP style programming as living in the pre-history. Environments like modern IDEs and languages like Wolfram might be the way forward to regain what was lost with the demise of Lisp Machines.

hga 12y ago

Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Nope, it turned out the "business" person/people who arranged the contracts for OEM sales of Lucid's Lisp did them as essentially loans, against the OEM's actual sales as I recall, and when they came due Lucid's investors felt that the success of Energize was sufficiently iffy the extra investment was not worth it. Details can be found on Richard Gabriel's web site: http://dreamsongs.com/ http://dreamsongs.com/ In general my take on what happened is somewhat different. It starts from the observation that when the Lisp Machine was developed, there was a great deal to be said for a custom TTL processor laser focused on Lisp. It was a good way to squeeze a lot of performance out of the available technology, pretty much the only way unless you were crazy enough to try to do it in ECL. And people could see the utility of what became the engineering workstation from the success of Xerox's Alto (which added graphics to NLS). As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. LMI didn't have the capital to do so, in fact, TI bailed them out and invested in them just to keep the company alive so they could do their own gate array Lisp Machine, the TI Explorer. Don't know what happened with TI, but LMI was eventually killed by Canadian politics. Symbolics was very badly managed by then, and continued to make a number of very bad decisions. And then, going back to Gabriel, there's the whole worse is better thesis. Worse is better seems to have fantastically greater survival characteristics, in fact, nowadays the only wildly successful The Right Thing software ecosystem is Java.... If there's such a strong ... force, if you will, against the approach of Lisp and therefore Lisp Machines, then it's hard to see how they could have survived.

lispm 12y ago
Not really. Lucid took the money from Lisp sales and invested it into C++. Read it in Gabriel's book. > As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. TI developed a single-chip microprocessor. The later TI Explorer and the MicroExplorer were based on microprocessor CPUs. DARPA financed it for the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. Symbolics did the same - they redid the CPU as a microprocessor, the Symbolics Ivory. Many Symbolics machines were based on that chip: XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, MacIvory 1/2/3 and the NXP1000. Symbolics did three iterations of the CPU and had a full design of a RISC cpu ready.