The lost cause of the Lisp machines
23 comments
·November 19, 2025GalaxyNova
Lisp is alive as ever in Emacs and Common Lisp, and Clojure and Racket
rmunn
Time to dig up a classic story about Tom Knight, who designed the first prototype of the Lisp Machine at MIT in the mid-70's. It's in the form of a classic Zen koan. This copy comes from https://jargondb.org/some_ai_koans but I've seen plenty of variations floating around.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
f1shy
Everybody knows, you have to wait at least 5 tau.
eschaton
Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long.
They showed signs that some people there understood that their development environment was it, but it obviously never fully got through to decision-makers: They had CLOE, a 386 PC deployment story in partnership with Gold Hill, but they’d have been far better served by acquiring Gold Hill and porting Genera to the 386 PC architecture.
anonnon
For those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)
f1shy
Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?
anonnon
I was both Alpha being quasi-open itself, like OpenPOWER today, and like earlier PDP minis had been, whereas VAX had been pretty locked down, and OpenVMS getting POSIX compatibility (admittedly probably more the latter than the former, but DEC was big on branding things "open" at the time, partly because they were losing ground):
https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vmslt05a/vu/alpha_hist...
> Although Alpha was declared an "open architecture" right from the start, there was no consortium to develop it. All R&D actions were handled by DEC itself, and sometimes in cooperation with Mitsubishi. In fact, though the architecture was free de jure, most important hardware designs of it were pretty much closed de facto, and had to be paid-licensed (if possible at all). So, it wasn't that thing helping to promote the architecture. To mention, soon after introduction of EV4, DEC's high management offered to license manufacturing rights to Intel, Motorola, NEC, and Texas Instruments. But all these companies were involved in different projects and were of very little to no interest in EV4, so they refused. Perhaps, the conditions could be also unacceptable, or something else. Mistake #5.
xkriva11
You may try CADR (precursor to Genera) on-line: https://lispcafe.org/cadr/usim.html
pjmlp
The Lisp environments are definitely around, in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.
karlgkk
“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.”
What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.
viccis
>They present a vision of the future that never happened
Hauntology strikes again
mghackerlady
I'm honestly surprised nobody tried to capitalize on the early 2000s Java hype by making some kind of Java box (there were a few things labeled as a Java OS or a Java workstation but none of these were really a "Java Machine")
lukego
Sun JavaStation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation
mghackerlady
I was aware of these, it's kinda what I meant by "None of these were really Java Machines". They were just shitty sparc machines that had Java OS in flash. It didn't have some kind of Java co-processor and still relied on a JVM. Java OS was pretty neat but I wouldn't really consider it a "Java OS" since it was basically just a microkernel that bootstrapped a JVM from what I've read. An actual Java machine IMO would have to at least have some kind of Java co-processor and not rely on a software based JVM
calgoo
In theory you could say that simcards were / (are?) Tiny java on a chip machines.
larsbrinkhoff
See also:
Amiga romantics.
8-bit romantics.
PDP-10 romantics.
Let them stay. Let them romantizice. <glasses tint="rose">
N_Lens
"Old man yells at Lisp Machines (And their enthusiasts)"
As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed.
The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenance.
I once had a discussion with the developers of Franz LISP. The way it worked was that it compiled LISP source files and produced .obj files. But instead of linking them into an executable, you had to load them into a run-time environment. So I asked, "could you put the run time environment in another .obj file, so you just link the entire program and get a standalone executable"? "Why would you want to do that?" "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them.
So was managing LISP files with source control, like everything else. LISP gurus were supposed to hack.
And, in the end, 1980s "AI" technology didn't do enough to justify that hardware.