What's a Lisp Machine?

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Mon Nov 30 16:50:01 1998

On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:

> Well, I don't know what other "LISP machines" exist, but a couple
> Symbolics 3600 just traded hands between collectors over here in the Bay
> Area.

"Traded hands" makes it sound like a laptop swap. These things were
bigger and heavier than refrigerators, and it was raining, and muddy.
Biggest damn "workstations" you ever saw!

Basically, a Lisp machine (or Lisp engine) has a (custom) CPU optimized to
deal with "symbols" rather than traditional data/addresses. In Lisp, data
is "typeless", so data instances are internally "tagged" with bits that
describe their representation. The Symbolics machine, and presumably
other Lisp engines, had hardware support for tagged data representations
and operations.

It was also a cool graphics machine and had a very nice development
environment. In fact, development environments from Lisp companies like
Symbolics and Lucid are still more advanced (10 years later) in many ways
than the Visual Drek that comes out of places like Microsoft (the king of
anti-productivty BloatWare).

-- Doug
Received on Mon Nov 30 1998 - 16:50:01 GMT