30 Nov
1998
30 Nov
'98
5:52 a.m.
Whilst reading around, I've come across quite a few refrences to the LispM,
or the Lisp Machine. What's a Lisp Machine? Was it a mini? Was it a micro?
Do any still run? Just curious...
-------
30 Nov
30 Nov
6:04 a.m.
Symbolics made a lisp box too. The entire OS was lisp based and was
real time editable. The people that used these boxen liked them a
whole lot, Swiss Bank (my employer) used about 20 of them at one point
but alas, all are gone.
Dan
On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Daniel A. Seagraves wrote:
Whilst reading around, I've come across quite a
few refrences to the LispM,
or the Lisp Machine. What's a Lisp Machine? Was it a mini? Was it a micro?
Do any still run? Just curious...
-------
6:19 a.m.
On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Daniel A. Seagraves wrote:
Whilst reading around, I've come across quite a
few refrences to the LispM,
or the Lisp Machine. What's a Lisp Machine? Was it a mini? Was it a micro?
Do any still run? Just curious...
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.
This particular machine is a 36-bit single-user machine (although you'd
mistakenly think it was a multi-user mainframe from the massive 6-foot
cabinet) that is optimized to execute LISP. It was built around 1983.
Symbolics was a pretty large company for a time, and was founded by one of
the guys who started the MIT AI-lab. Symbolics went bankrupt in the early
90s, and bought out in 1995 by the original founder and renamed Symbolics
Technology Inc.
Check out more info at <http://home.brightware.com/~rwk/symbolics/>
I'll hopefully have some pictures to post from the move in a short while.
I still need to find a serial transfer cable for my Olympus D-220L camera
and Olympus is not being very helpful by ignoring my requests sent on
their web site.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Always being hassled by the man.
Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0
See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details!
[Last web site update: 11/02/98]
8:50 a.m.
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
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