Back in the day there was ITS, Maclisp and Emacs on top of TECO.
Open Genera in the early 90s then ran on OSF/1 UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 , renamed to Digital UNIX) on DEC Alpha. OSF meant Open Software Foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation ), a group propagating "open standards" for UNIX.
Instead of having slow-ish boot times in a Lisp machine, GNU's plan was to put several memory-protected concurrent interpreters under Unix, giving the user far more power by default with GNU/Hurd against a common Unix users. WIth namespaces, for instance, you could forget about suid and/or needing group perms to mount a device or access different media and soundcards.