Possible additional point: going into the 80s/90s (the last gasps of "alternative" personal computing architecture), there were not many widely-adopted standards across computing. This is why we all bitched about file incompatibility across systems etc. But now we have all of this great stuff: format standards, APIs, hell, even TCP/IP is a universal standard that allows all manner of exotic hardware to speak to the rest of the world.
I think something like Lisp/Smalltalk/SomethingNewOS machines might have another shot here soon, especially with the loss of gains from Moore's law
I would buy a lisp machine the moment someone releases it. Of course, I'd be interested in actual competitive personal/embedded CPUs, not hobbyists attempts.
You could try Mezzano [1].
Re:The Scheme Machine (1994) [pdf]
by 3rdAccount on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @04:09PM
(#17710231)
I'd love to have a true Lisp or Smalltalk OS.
Closest thing in development at the moment:
https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS
Symbolics had C, Pascal and Fortran compilers written in Lisp running on their machines. Others developed an Ada system for these machines. Drawback for all those: expensive and running not that fast. The interesting part: they allowed interactive development in these languages and one could run some C software a bit more safely due to runtime type checking. Examples for non-Lisp programs running on them: TeX and the usual X11 server.
The explosion did not happen during their lifetime, because the whole package was expensive (RAM&Disk was very expensive), it was tied to higher-end hardware with lots of memory, it has never been ported to other architectures on the metal (an Alpha machine - expensive already - would have been fast enough to run a full Lisp OS - but all one had was an emulator for it ... there was not enough manpower to make it run natively) and because the OS was mostly limited to one person, one GUI and one Lisp per machine - it was no real server OS with securely (somehow) separated programs.