Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

I was around the AI Lab at the time (working for the EECS department sysop'ing their undergrad Lisp Machines and DEC-20), and the dream was to incarnate Lisp in hardware and surpass the slow, multi-user PDP-10's/DEC-20's in use at the time. Plus, the sheer temptation of running Lisp "all the way down" (well, not in microcode, though that was written in a Lispy assembler) was just too great to resist. Plus it was early in the workstation era (Sun, Apollo, etc) and people were hooked on the idea of personal graphics-based workstations.

Within a few years, though, desktop machines running optimized Lisp compilers were surpassing the raw performance of the Lisp Machines, though of course there was nothing like the whole system (Genera).

In the end, "worse is better", plus "AI winter" happened, which put the Symbolics/LMI/TI LispMs out of business.

But something real was lost--I don't think the world has ever seen a more powerful development environment.

One step forward, and four steps back...

There's no technical reason a Lisp processor couldn't have followed the same development path as workstation/PC processors and kept up, but it didn't have the volume to sustain the development effort.

Well, being a very CISC-y architecture means they couldn't have kept up with Intel, who spent/d billions on their line.

The last CPU that was being developed at Symbolics is actually RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Sunstone

The competitor LMI was also developing their next-generation Lisp machine RISC processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems

More about the latter: http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm

Well, Symbolics did not manufacture the new CPU. That would have been too costly.

LMI manufactured prototypes of their CPU, but these were older technology - not microprocessors, but VME-board sized CPUs.

Xerox mantioned that they were developing a Lisp RISC, but it never surfaced. The SPUR project designed a Lisp RISC Chip: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/markhill/Papers/jsscc89_vlsi_spur.pdf

? x86 is obviously very CISCy. Another example is IBM's Z architecture which they keep making faster and faster. The argument is _economical_ not technical.

IOW, the architectural benefit for Lisp machine weren't enough to overcome the benefit offered by Moores law. Today, things look different but it would be a much harder sell to push Lisp or any non-C launguage.

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