Erik Naggum (erik@naggum.no) wrote:
: the Lisp Machines died for reasons totally unrelated to quality. actually,
: they died for the same reason that mind-bogglingly inferior systems won.
: the answer is a single word: "marketing".
I don't think this is true... Lisp machines died because their
functionality was supplanted by other more general purpose machines.
Example: My former roomate (mid-80's) was a chip designer. He had
two giant systems on his desk, a lisp machine (TI Explorer?) and
an Apollo. He was always complaining about how inconvenient it
was that part of his work was done on the lisp machine (chip design)
and that the rest was done on the Apollo (word processing, email,
manufacturing apps). When their software group was able to port
their applications to the same box their other applications ran
on, they dropped the lisp machine without hesitation.
In other words: Marketing didn't kill lisp machines... Good lisp
environments that ran on general-purpose computers killed
lisp machines.
Mark.
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