Why don't people like lisp?

[Rainer Joswig]

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote in message news:<DLydnTdiX___iw2iRVn-tQ at comcast.com>...
> Someone wrote:
> > >>It is still a question of heated debate what actually killed the
>  lisp
> > >>machine industry.
> 
> The premise of this question is that there actually was a lisp-machine
> industry (LMI) to be killed.  My memory is that is was stillborn and
> that the promoters never presented a *convincing* value proposition to
> enough potentional customers to really get it off the ground.

Revenues of Symbolics in 1986 were in the range of about 100 million
dollars. This was probably the peak time.

> Never having seen one, or read an independent description, I cannot
> confirm or  'dipsute' this.  But taking this as given, there is the
> overlooked matter of price.  How many people, Lispers included, are
> going to buy, for instance, an advanced, technically excellent,
> hydrogen fuel cell car, complete with in-garage hydrogen generator
> unit, for, say $200,000.

Customers were defence industries, research labs, animation companies,
etc.

A machine usable for 3d animation from Symbolics was well in the
$100,000 range. Each 3d software module might have been around
$25,000 - remember that was in years 1985 - 1990.

>From then prices went down. The mainstream workstation business model
switched rapidly (to Unix workstations) and Symbolics could not
adopt (and successful) fast enough. They tried by:
- selling a half-assed PC-based solution
- selling VME cards for SUNs
- selling NuBUS cards for Mac II
- and finally selling an emulator for their OS running on DEC Alphas

> I believe these are disputable.  The American broadcast industry
> switched to color displays in the 50s-60s.  Around 1980 there were
> game consoles (specialized computers) and small 'general purpose'
> computers that piggybacked on color televisions.  TV game consoles
> thrive today while general PC color computing switched (mid80s) to
> computer monitors with the higher resolution needed for text.  It was
> their use with PCs that brought the price down to where anyone could
> buy one.

Sure, but Symbolics could do 3d animations in full HDTV qualitiy
in 1987 (or earlier?). I've seen animations by Sony or Smarties
done on Lisp machines. Several TV stations did their broadcast
quality logo animations on Lisp machines. The animations
for the ground breaking TRON movie were done on Lisp machines.
Etc.

> Did lisp machines really have guis before Xerox and Apple?

Xerox was producing Lisp machines, too. Of course they
had graphical user interfaces - they were developed at
about the same time as the Smalltalk machines of Xerox.
So, they did not have it before Xerox - they were Xerox. ;-)

MIT Lisp machines had megabit b&w displays with
mouse driven GUIs before the 80s, IIRC. In mid 1980
they switched to a new revolutionary object-oriented graphics
system (Dynamic Windows).

> Did lisp machine companies make laser printers before other companies
> like HP made them for anyone to use?  If so, what did they price them
> at?

Symbolics was just reselling Laser printers. The Symbolics OS
could output to Postscript somewhen in mid 1980s - the Concordia
system was a software for book/manual production and could
produce large scale hypertext documents (the Symbolics manual set
had almost 10000 pages) - printing to postscript.

Xerox had of course connected their Lisp machines to their
laser printers.

More stuff on: http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html

Remember, most of that is HISTORY.