On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:19:45 +1200, greg wrote: > That's what killed things like the Lisp machine. Their developers > couldn't keep up with the huge resources that people like Intel and > Motorola had to throw at CPU development, so eventually a > general-purpose CPU could run Lisp faster than a Lisp machine.
When you say "eventually", I think you mean "decades ago". I recall a collaboration between Apple and Texas Instruments to build a Macintosh with a Lisp Machine in the late 1980s. From the one box, you could run two computers simultaneously, with two operating systems, one running the Motorola 68020 and the other a Lisp Machine processor. I don't think it sold very well -- by memory, benchmarks showed that for half (or less) of the price, you could run Lisp in software on a vanilla Mac and the software would be faster than running it on the Lisp Machine. TI also had at least one Nubus card for the Mac running a Lisp Machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Explorer On a similar note, there were Forth machines also available for the Apple Macintosh. Unlike Lisp, I think they suffered from the general lack of popularity of Forth rather than lack of speed. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list