Ask HN: How many of you have used or even heard of a Lisp Machine?

7 points

17 years ago

The Lisp Machines (admittedly a dead branch of the evolutionary tree) embodied plenty of good ideas, many of which have yet to spread to the rest of the computing universe:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en&dmode=source&output=gplain

"We owe it to the losers in these little skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework. And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost. That's both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost."

Yet most programmers seem to be entirely unaware that these marvels ever existed. Even Ted Nelson's "Geeks Bearing Gifts", the supposedly iconoclastic "we're doing it all wrong" history of computing leaves them out entirely.

How many people here have ever programmed on a Lisp Machine? I recall that PG once wrote about his experiences. Has anyone else? Why is there scarcely any memory left in the community of what it was like to use one?

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