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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
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In article <01bc13dc$cfaa2b20$0f02000a@gjchome.nis.newscorp.com>, "George
J. Carrette" <gjc@delphi.com> wrote:

> 1. All of the lisp hardware vendors spent tens of millions of dollars
>     telling the world that special purpose hardware was required, that
>     using lisp without it was impractical, and that anybody who tried to
>     do otherwise was some kind of backward turkey bound to lose.
>     Shops who purchased these machines spent a huge about of money
>     and put a lot on the line in order to be state of the art.

This is too broad a brush-stroke.  There were some within Symbolics that
pushed hard for a non-proprietary HW solution.  The most vocal was
Howard Cannon, who worked hard to develop an 80x86 capability.

Also, with current large address spaces, large RAMs, large disks, and
very high performance chips, it is easy to look backwards and criticize
'Lisp HW'.  Keep in mind that with only 2-8 Mbytes of memory in the early
1980's, these machines had spectacular capabilities and performance.  Rather
than 'ride the wave' of Moore's Law, however, they just fell off the surfboard
somewhere about 1986.
