They were beasts. I left mine at my parent's house, and was hoping to reclaim it, but my cousin John had borrowed it and sold it years later. I should have kept tabs on it!
When I look at the video of Kalman Reti running Symbolics Lisp Machine in an emulator [1], I am still blown away by how much more sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing it was compared to my PET or the Apple ii. The difference seems almost asynchronous, like time-traveler tech.
How you could just drop in to any system library, or even the kernel, and use the same language, Lisp, to modify anything live is astounding. A lot of people have dismissed any talk of how great LISP Machines were as a bunch of nostalgia, but I don't think any of them have watched 15 minutes of somebody operating in that environment. You can't look at it, and keep a straight face when talking about how great the Apple ii was or the Lisa for that matter later on.
The demo by Kalman is pretty cool. Over a period of a decade there were many high-end applications for the machines. The base system could cost from a few ten thousand to $250000 for full set up used in the TV and Broadcast industry: machine, console, software, color screen, huge amounts of memory, large disks, video tape recorder, graphics co-processor, graphics tablet, ... That's far away from the home computers from Commodore.
When I look at the video of Kalman Reti running Symbolics Lisp Machine in an emulator [1], I am still blown away by how much more sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing it was compared to my PET or the Apple ii. The difference seems almost asynchronous, like time-traveler tech.
How you could just drop in to any system library, or even the kernel, and use the same language, Lisp, to modify anything live is astounding. A lot of people have dismissed any talk of how great LISP Machines were as a bunch of nostalgia, but I don't think any of them have watched 15 minutes of somebody operating in that environment. You can't look at it, and keep a straight face when talking about how great the Apple ii was or the Lisa for that matter later on.