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Comment by amszmidt | Hacker News Reader

There was nothing "prototype" or "throwaway" about the CADR, it was heavily used at the AI lab for over 10 years, with both the Lambda and 3600 heavily based on it, to the point that the Lambda was microcode source and Lisp FASL compatible with it.

The CADR "software" does not include "Flavors" -- that is part of the Lisp Machine operating system (which for a large of its life was shared between the CADR and Lambda, and even partially for the 3600 series), which is just plain Lisp and unrelated to hardware.

None of TI or Symbolics machines had these type of optimisations that you mention. The Ivory did not have any special method dispatching optimisations. The Explorer was basically a Lambda.

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Yes, it’s a throwaway prototype that overstayed its welcome for over 10 years, as it tends to happen in computing all the time. You said it yourself elsewhere that it’s a grad project.

You are nitpicking here as usual. The point is that OOP was something expected to be available on Lisp machines.

Okay, I will spoon-feed you. Open the specification on Bitsavers and search for “4.7 Generic Function and Message Passing”.

I'm quite familiar, I've restored and written simulators and implemented FPGAs for almost all of them in various states of disarray. Your claim was that they had special architecture optimisations, that was not the case, and a common misconception -- your quite condescending tone notwithstanding. OOP was indeed available, but it was software -- just like in CL, and not backed by hardware, and essentially the same way it is done today.

And we never actually got the LMI K-Machine, which was planned to have some of the special hardware people think they all had

The K-Machine would be a super interesting retro-computing project to get going. The schematics, the Lisp Machine system associated for it, are available (I'm unsure of legal status). If anyone is interested in driving that, I'd be really interested to help (but my primary interest is just the CADR due to lack of hours in the day :-) )

Here is a wonderful article about the K-Machine: http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm

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