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A comment on Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available. Parent comment

Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by ScottBurson on Sunday November 07, 2010 @01:27AM (#1878846)
BTW I have a different theory about why Lisp Machines failed in the market. Symbolics and LMI were spoiled by the high prices the machines originally commanded (under the influence of the AI bubble and DoD money) and didn't realize how aggressive they needed to be about making them cheap. When the Sun 4/110 came out, it was about 1/5 the price of a comparable Lisp Machine, and faster. Had LispMs been price-competitive with workstations, they would at least have lasted a few more years. Of course, in the end even the workstation vendors succumbed to the marauding hordes of PCs.
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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by sedachv on Sunday November 07, 2010 @03:33PM (#1880254)
I think the fundamental problem of Symbolics was their strategy as a systems company. They were a half-assed hardware company that could not keep up in price or performance and didn't even bother to let others develop system software for it, and they were a half-assed software company that didn't bother to port their software to other computers (a $10,000 plug-in board for a Macintosh does not count as a port).

They were also a pretty good computer graphics and computer algebra software company, and both those divisions got sold off and continued their work for a number of years after Symbolics itself went out of business.

It's interesting to note that by the time of Symbolics' demise (I'm placing it at 1993ish, although that's probably not accurate), even IBM realized that developing systems as integrated software/hardware architectures was not feasible.

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by Opie_taylor on Monday November 08, 2010 @11:49AM (#1883019)
One word: Apple

It's feasible.

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by sedachv on Monday November 08, 2010 @12:55PM (#1883258)
Apple has never developed their own hardware architecture.
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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by wrs on Monday November 08, 2010 @05:28PM (#1884299)
You must be using a very narrow definition of "hardware architecture". In the 68K era Apple used to custom-design pretty much everything interesting in the box except the processor and memory. The IIfx was perhaps the most extreme example (several custom ASICs and two 6502-based I/O coprocessors, IIRC). For the Newton we even designed parts of the processor (e.g., the MMU).
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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by sedachv on Tuesday November 09, 2010 @04:34PM (#1888010)
Let's take your example of the IIfx: off the shelf 68k processor on NuBus. ASICs and I/O coprocessors are just devices. Granted I didn't know about the custom processor work on the Newton, but if IIfx counts as a new hardware architecture, then so does the x86 move from ISA and 8259A to PCI-E and APIC. And I don't think it makes sense to argue that today's Macs have anything resembling a custom architecture.

Symbolics' systems and the first AS/400 models (the last new hardware/software architecture developed by IBM) are in a totally different class.

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by wrs on Tuesday November 09, 2010 @08:24PM (#1888783)
Fair enough: sounds like your definition of "hardware architecture" is limited to the processor itself.

If you're curious about the Newton processor: http://www.ot1.com/arm/armchap1.html (see the "ARM6" section).

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by sedachv on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @02:02AM (#1889475)
Well, processor and memory (I certainly think NUMA machines are different), everything else is pretty much just I/O.

Thanks for the link.

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by hga on Sunday November 07, 2010 @12:20PM (#1879770)
Indeed; whatever the mistakes these companies made (also include the TI Explorer), they were zapped first by 32 bit microprocessors (a sustaining technology, but not one adopted quickly enough by Symbolics (plus they picked a bad initial platform to put their microprocessor on)) and then PCs (a classic disruptive technology).
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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by lispm on Sunday November 07, 2010 @12:37PM (#1879817)
Symbolics had a DOS board for their Lisp Machines. The Ivory ran embedded in Macs and SUNs. They had a PC-based offering: CLOE.

It did not help.

The basic limitations of Genera: complex interwoven software with lots of legacy stuff, single user, single image, no security ... just did not scale and was not on a growth path.

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