What's a Lisp Machine?

I spoke with Chuck Fry, an old friend who once worked for Symbolics, and he gave some additional information regarding the Lisp engines produced at Symbolics. The Macintosh SBC was called the MacIvory. He gave some specifics about which of these devices which a computer collector might want, and this information will come in a later posting. Still, he said that the company is still in business, having been bought out by some individual but, that it is apparently nothing more than a maintenance operation. Still, when I get the telephone number of this person (he has an AOL account, as I understand), I will call him and see if he is aware of the availability of some MacIvory's and what one might cost. Chuck noted that the MacIvory worked only for nubus Mac's and that it had a tendency to crash MacOS. He said that the TI product was more resilient in hardware than MacIvory but, the condition was just the reverse for software executed on the respective machines. That is, the TI did not crash so often but, the applications were not so well developed or capable. William R. Buckley