
A Brief History of Lisp Machines (2008) - type0
http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/lisp/
======
cpr
I was around the AI Lab at the time (working for the EECS department sysop'ing
their undergrad Lisp Machines and DEC-20), and the dream was to incarnate Lisp
in hardware and surpass the slow, multi-user PDP-10's/DEC-20's in use at the
time. Plus, the sheer temptation of running Lisp "all the way down" (well, not
in microcode, though that was written in a Lispy assembler) was just too great
to resist. Plus it was early in the workstation era (Sun, Apollo, etc) and
people were hooked on the idea of personal graphics-based workstations.

Within a few years, though, desktop machines running optimized Lisp compilers
were surpassing the raw performance of the Lisp Machines, though of course
there was nothing like the whole system (Genera).

In the end, "worse is better", plus "AI winter" happened, which put the
Symbolics/LMI/TI LispMs out of business.

But something real was lost--I don't think the world has ever seen a more
powerful development environment.

One step forward, and four steps back...

~~~
FullyFunctional
There's no _technical_ reason a Lisp processor couldn't have followed the same
development path as workstation/PC processors and kept up, but it didn't have
the volume to sustain the development effort.

~~~
cpr
Well, being a very CISC-y architecture means they couldn't have kept up with
Intel, who spent/d billions on their line.

~~~
erikj
The last CPU that was being developed at Symbolics is actually RISC:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Sunstone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Sunstone)

The competitor LMI was also developing their next-generation Lisp machine RISC
processor:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems)

More about the latter:
[http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm](http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm)

~~~
lispm
Well, Symbolics did not manufacture the new CPU. That would have been too
costly.

LMI manufactured prototypes of their CPU, but these were older technology -
not microprocessors, but VME-board sized CPUs.

Xerox mantioned that they were developing a Lisp RISC, but it never surfaced.
The SPUR project designed a Lisp RISC Chip:
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/markhill/Papers/jsscc89_vlsi_spur.pdf

------
ra88it
I still fantasize about having lisp "all the way down", but I'm not sure what
I mean or ought to mean when I am fantasizing. On the one hand, I mean
implementing lisp in hardware as fundamentally as possible (don't really know
why this would be valuable, but I'm still drawn to it). On the other hand, I
mean having lisp be the foundation at the software level (ie., the kernel and
the rest of the OS; I can more easily see how this would be valuable).

Can someone here speak to the notion of a lisp machine in the future? Is there
any chance this could happen? Would it be valuable? Does anybody else here
have this same dream/fantasy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it?

(edited slightly for wording and clarity)

~~~
richardjdare
Ever since I found out about Lisp machines I've been a bit obsessed with them.
When I got the leaked distribution of Symbolics Genera going in Linux I felt
like I was in possession of a crashed UFO. The user experience of the
Listener, with its rich output (almost a "scrolling desktop") was exactly what
I wanted from a command line. As I imagined what that system would be like if
development had continued I started getting so many ideas, it was thrilling.

And at that time I hardly knew Lisp! What excited me was the user experience
of the Listener, the notion of programming being a way to use the computer,
not just to construct software - and the way each piece of software in the
system was practically an API for my own use. This was sci-fi stuff to me,
extremely inspiring.

I don't know how we could move towards the creation of modern Lisp machines.
Disappointingly for this old Amiga user, we don't really have regular
computers that aren't ugly old x86 any more. But I think about trying to work
these ideas into my software development all the time. Genera had such an
impact on me I can't avoid it.

~~~
vram22
>the notion of programming being a way to use the computer, not just to
construct software - and the way each piece of software in the system was
practically an API for my own use.

I've never used a Lisp machine, but based on your description, it sounds like
the experience of using them might have been somewhat like using the Oberon
system created by Niklaus Wirth- or the other way around (based on a BYTE
magazine article [1] about Oberon that I read, IIRC - never used Oberon
either).

[1] I thought so because this part of your comment:

>the way each piece of software in the system was practically an API for my
own use

matched somewhat with something I read in that BYTE article, which was
something to the effect that once you had written a subroutine in Oberon, it
could be called from anywhere in the OS. IOW, in a sense, the whole OS was
like a single program, that you could program. Cool concept.

Though the Oberon system might have been much less evolved, or whatever - as I
said, used neither, just interested in the thing.

P.S. From the Wikipedia article about Wirth:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth#Humor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth#Humor)

[ Wirth has reportedly told the joke that, because Europeans pronounce his
name properly, while Americans pronounce it as "nickel's worth", he is _called
by name_ in Europe and _called by value_ in America. ]

~~~
pjmlp
I had access to the Native Oberon version during the 90's.

Oberon was inspired by Mesa/Cedar, there are quite a few Xerox papers about
how Mesa/Cedar used to work. This is probably the most relevant one.

Think about a Lisp/Smalltalk environment, but based on a strong typed language
instead.

Regarding Oberon, it had similar ideas.

Basically there were no programs, only modules (strong typed dynamic
libraries).

Any procedure/function that had a special type signature could be called from
the CLI environment, UI action, or after selecting an UI element, depending on
the way the mouse buttons were used.

Also the environment was focused on graphics not plain text.

The last version before Active Oberon was introduced, System 3 with Gadgets,
had quite nice Amiga style GUI.

You can find tons of screenshots on my site.

~~~
vram22
>Basically there were no programs, only modules (strong typed dynamic
libraries). >Any procedure/function that had a special type signature could be
called from the CLI environment, UI action, or after selecting an UI element,
depending on the way the mouse buttons were used. >Also the environment was
focused on graphics not plain text.

Pretty cool. Thanks for mentioning it.

>You can find tons of screenshots on my site.

I googled for your HN username + " site"; is it this one:

[http://www.progtools.org/blog.php](http://www.progtools.org/blog.php) ?

~~~
pjmlp
Yup

------
imwally
Most of the links on this page are broken so here are the archived versions
(thanks Internet Archive!):

The CONS protoype (AI Memo 444):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060211063312/http://home.comca...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060211063312/http://home.comcast.net:80/%7Eprunesquallor/memo444.htm)

The CADR (AI Memo 528):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050411174516/http://home.comca...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050411174516/http://home.comcast.net/~prunesquallor/memo528.htm)

The Symbolics lisp machine museum:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20000605210626/http://kogs-
www.i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000605210626/http://kogs-
www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de:80/~moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html)

After-the-demise symbolics info:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060101010104/http://www.abstra...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060101010104/http://www.abstractscience.freeserve.co.uk:80/symbolics/)

P. Tucker Withington's contemporary thoughts:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20040810204319/http://www2.theci...](https://web.archive.org/web/20040810204319/http://www2.thecia.net:80/users/ptw/LispM.html)

Lisp family tree:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060202000304/http://community....](https://web.archive.org/web/20060202000304/http://community.computerhistory.org:80/scc/projects/LISP/)

~~~
lispm
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP)

[https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-
info/symb...](https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-
info/symbolics.html)

------
linguae
About a year ago or so I was bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and since
then I've become very interested in Lisp machines, particularly Symbolics
machines running the Genera operating system. I'm in my late 20's and thus I
wasn't around when Lisp machines were in their heyday; however, I believe that
it's sad how the proverbial baby (Lisp OSes such as Genera) was thrown out
with the bathwater (Lisp machines) when Lisp machines were gradually replaced
with Unix workstations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would have been
nice had Genera or another Lisp OS been ported to the x86 instead of Lisp
users having to switch to Unix. Sometimes I even dream of an alternative
history where RMS embarked on a GNU-licensed Lisp operating system instead of
GNU.

I wonder what type of legal challenges are inherent in making Genera open
source? My limited understanding of the situation is that the IP of Symbolics
is held up in an odd manner due to the dissolution of the company, but I don't
know all of the details. It would be nice if Genera were open source and
ported to the x86-64. Barring that, a free software clone of Genera would be
nice, but it may be a substantial implementation effort.

~~~
erikj
John C. Mallery owns the IP of Symbolics right now, as far as I know. Someone
mentioned that he had plans to open source it, but it was a long time ago.

~~~
auvi
With my limited (or next to none) knowledge of software copyrights, I am
wondering how come the IP of a company ends up belonging to a single person.
Is that the case?

------
gumby
I programmed almost all of those machines at one point, both Interlisp flavor
(dandelion -- wrote custom microcode for it), dolphin, Dorado; MIT CADR,
Symbolics CADR, TI (LMI) CADR, various 36XXs (had two 3650s in my office at
one point, used them both), but moved on before the ivory Mac plug in came
along. It was a nice spur on the computing road, but ultimately not worth it.
The tagging ideals still survive, e.g. in the RISC-V.

Sadly though the philosophy that everything should be programmable has mostly
been lost, though partially revived in the browser. But only partially.

~~~
FullyFunctional
> The tagging ideals still survive, e.g. in the RISC-V.

I'm not sure what you are thinking of, but there's no such thing in RISC-V.
Possibly you are referring the the goals of lowRISC, which will be RISC-V
based but have various extensions.

~~~
gumby
Yes, that is what I was thinking of.

------
shaunxcode
I own a quadra Mac ivory (I did just partially want to gloat). Genera is
definitely worth the hype. The "present as" system in clim is amazing. Another
thing is the cool app icon that is a combination of the famous cons cell but
with cdr pointing to an Apple icon! I will hopefully be making some more
videos of it shortly. One thing I discovered alread is there was a genera
HyperCard API - Imagine the world we could have had!

I did ask the fellow from genera about disaster recovery (failed or borked
hdd) and he said as I am a license holder he can send me cds or send the hdd
and have him image it. The full source for genera is part of the image so tons
of interactive docs and source to explore!

------
jecel
When people find out I design Smalltalk computers, they often say something
like "oh! You probably don't know this, but in the 1980s some people tried to
build a computer to run Lisp and it failed completely". My reply is that every
computer except two (PC clones and the IBM 360) from back then failed
completely. So it doesn't make sense to claim being language specific was the
cause of its demise.

~~~
scroot
Where can we get one?

~~~
jecel
Do you mean where you can get a Smalltalk computer? I still haven't finished
though I have been working on it for a long time. But I am getting pretty
close so it should be possible to get one in a few months.

Pictures of my previous efforts:
[http://www.smalltalk.org.br/fotos/](http://www.smalltalk.org.br/fotos/) (with
68000 and ARM processor)
[http://merlintec.com/swiki/hardware/28.html](http://merlintec.com/swiki/hardware/28.html)
(with my own processor starting in 1999)

~~~
scroot
Yes, a Smalltalk computer. Very nice. Are you working with SiliconSqueak? I
can never tell what the status of that project is. I would definitely pick one
up / build one.

~~~
jecel
Yes, SiliconSqueak is what I have been working on since 2009. It is actually
based on an idea I had in 2004 but I didn't work on because I couldn't get the
Squeak community interested. The latest description is from early 2015 and is
missing a lot of stuff:

[http://www.merlintec.com/download/jecel_phd_deposited.pdf](http://www.merlintec.com/download/jecel_phd_deposited.pdf)

Currently I am replacing the ALU Matrix coprocessor described there with an
alternative that is more generally useful. I will move the text somewhere
public (github, for example) so people can always access the lasted version.

Back to the original topic, it is interesting to discuss what good would a
Lisp Machine (or Smalltalk computer) be in 2017? Would it run the language
faster than a x86 processor? Lisp Machines tried to be the best possible
interpreter, but we now have advanced adaptive compilation technology. A very
parallel Lisp could be really fast in a dedicated architecture (see GPUs and
similar) but most people are interested in normal, sequential Lisp. In that
case it might still have a niche if it could perform as well (or nearly as
well) but with far fewer transistors (lower power and lower cost).

In short: a 2017 Lisp Machine should either go beyond the current Von Neumann
model or it should do what you can do with Lisp on normal machines but cheaper
and with less energy.

------
olewhalehunter
A reference from the late 80s, "Principles of Artificial Intelligence and
Expert Systems Development" 1 Jan 1988, David W. Rolston

[https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/51rCBcebCBL...](https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/51rCBcebCBL._SX334_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)

------
DonaldFisk
The page hasn't been updated since 2008 and is full of broken links.

