Looking for LMI LISP Machines

From: Bill von Hagen <wvh_at_gethip.com>
Date: Tue May 2 03:53:40 2000

Perhaps a PERQ was not a LISP machine if hardware support for LISP and
supporting services such as garbage collection is your criteria, but a
workstation whose primary function was running LISP at that time seems to
me to count, especially given that a microcoded LISP environment provides
opportunities for low-level machine optimization for LISP along the same
lines as other systems' hardware mods. Certainly the folks who spun off ETI
from PERQ Systems to do AI work would have disagreed with you (though they
quickly moved to TI Exploders as the PERQs quickly demonstrated themselves
to be an evolutionary dead end). Much early CMU Common LISP work (then
known as Spice LISP) was done on PERQs and then ported to other platforms
after their demise. Spice LISP on PERQs was one of the LISP environments
benchmarked in Gabriel's "Performance of Lisp Systems" (1985) along side
the Symbos, LMI boxes, MIT CADR, etc, though to be fair, others included
Franz Lisp, VAX Common LISP and Data General LISP.

   Bill

At 06:53 PM 5/4/00 +0100, you wrote:
> > have working samples of most/all of the other classic LispMs (PERQs, TI
>
>Hmm... While there certainly was a (microcoded) Lisp for the PERQ, I am
>not sure I'd call the machine a 'lisp machine'. There was no hardware
>support for lisp in the sense that the true Lisp Machines provided it.
>
>-tony
Received on Tue May 02 2000 - 03:53:40 BST