I briefly met the Symbolics engineers and I didn't get the feeling that they were zealots like you suggest. This all happened over 30 years ago. Intel didn't h

I briefly met the Symbolics engineers and I didn't get the feeling that they were zealots like you suggest. This all happened over 30 years ago. Intel didn't have a hegemony in CPUs. There was funding available to try new things in hardware. Some of it failed, some of it succeeded. Thirty years from now we will be rolling in laughter at the absurdity of so many of today's startups.