BIG successes of Lisp

[Christian Lynbech]

>>>>> "mike420" == mike420  <mike420 at ziplip.com> writes:

mike420> c. Emacs has a reputation for being slow and bloated.

People making that claim most often does not understand what Emacs
really is or how to use it effectively. Try to check out what other
popular software use up on such peoples machines, stuff like KDE or
gnome or mozilla or any Java based application.

This just isn't a very relevant issue on modern equipment.

mike420> For the sake of being balanced: there were also some *big*
mike420> failures, such as Lisp Machines. They failed because
mike420> they could not compete with UNIX (SUN, SGI) in a time when 
mike420> performance, multi-userism and uptime were of prime importance. 

It is still a question of heated debate what actually killed the lisp
machine industry. 

I have so far not seen anybody dipsuting that they were a marvel of
technical excellence, sporting stuff like colour displays, graphical
user interfaces and laser printers way ahead of anybody else.

In fact the combined bundle of a Symbolics machine is so good that
there still is a viable market for those 20-30 years old machines
(been there, done that, still needs to get it to run :-) I challenge
you to get a good price for a Sun 2 with UNIX SYSIII or whatever they
were equipped with at the time.

As far as I know Symbolics was trying to address the price issues but
the new generation of the CPU was delayed which greatly contributed to
the original demise and subsequent success of what we now know as
stock hardware. Do not forget that when the Sun was introduced it was
by no means obvious who was going to win the war of the graphical
desktop server.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic at hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)