Why don't people like lisp?

[Paolo Amoroso]

[followup set to comp.lang.lisp only]

Terry Reedy writes:

> 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

LMI may be a confusing acronym for that. LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc.) was
just one of the vendors, together with Symbolics, Texas Instruments,
Xerox and a few minor ones (e.g. Siemens).

As for your point, you may check the book:

  "The Brain Makers - Genius, Ego, and Greed in the Quest for Machines
  that Think"
  H.P. Newquist
  SAMS Publishing, 1994
  ISBN 0-672-30412-0


> that the promoters never presented a *convincing* value proposition to
> enough potentional customers to really get it off the ground.

>From page 2 of the above mentioned book:

  [...] Symbolics [...] had been able to accomplish in those four
  years what billion-dollar computer behemoths like IBM, Hewlett
  Packard, and Digital Equipment could not: It had brought an
  intelligent machine to market.


>> >>I have so far not seen anybody dipsuting that they were a marvel
> of
>> >>technical excellence,
>
> Never having seen one, or read an independent description, I cannot
> confirm or  'dipsute' this.  But taking this as given, there is the

Here are a few relevant Google queries (I am offline and I don't have
the URLs handy):

  lisp machines symbolics ralf moeller museum
  minicomputer orphanage [see theese PDF documentation sections: mit,
  symbolics, ti, xerox]

You may also search for "lisp machine video" at this weblog:

  http://lemonodor.com


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

Xerox was also a Lisp Machine vendor. If I recall correctly, the first
Lisp Machine was developed at MIT in the mid 1970s, and it had a GUI.


> Did all the LMI companies adopt the same version of Lisp so an outside
> Lisper could write one program and sell it to run on all?  Or did they

At least early products of major Lisp Machines vendors were
descendants of the CADR machine developed at MIT.


Paolo
-- 
Paolo Amoroso <amoroso at mclink.it>