BIG successes of Lisp (was ...)

Thu Oct 16 01:30:37 EDT 2003

mike420 at ziplip.com wrote:
> For the sake of being balanced: there were also some *big*
> failures, such as Lisp Machines. They failed because
> they could not compete with UNIX (SUN, SGI)

I think it's more likely that the specialised hardware
they used couldn't keep up in performance with developments
in the widely-used CPUs from Motorola, Intel, etc. who,
because of their large markets, could afford to pour
lots of effort into making them fast. So there came
a time when it was faster to run a Lisp program on
an off-the-shelf CPU than on a Lisp machine.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg