At 10:03 3/18/98 -0800, you wrote:
>[Symbolics 3650]
>
>Was that the LISPMs that lived at MIT?
>-------
>
>
No -- I don't think so -- at least at the beginning.
My understanding is that the original Lisp Machine was designed and built
by Tom Knight at MIT back in about 1977 or so as part of his, I think,
Master's thesis. 'LMI' (Lisp Machines, Inc.) was incorporated to actually
produce the things -- Symbolics, Inc. was formed a bit later. Richard
Greenblatt also worked on the original machine (called, as I remember,
'Cadr') and went with LMI. David Moon and a horde of other MIT Lisp hackers
went with Symbolics.
Everything went belly-up about 10-years ago when Lisp on standard boxes
(Suns, et. al.) became fast enough to compete with the specialized
microcoded hardware found in the Lisp Machines -- which were also quite
expensive.
I am going from memory on this -- dates etc may vary...
Regards
Jack
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Received on Thu Mar 19 1998 - 10:22:17 GMT