The Lisp Machines were designed to be individual workstations, in an era when virtually all computers were batch or time-shared machines. I remember seeing a video from Symbolics, the leading Lisp Machine vendor, from the late 80s. Some VP of product development was on the screen, and he was talking the usual business stuff: blah blah improve developer productivity, blah blah features, blah blah. Then he said something interesting, something I've never heard from a hardware or software executive: "We want to make it possible for a small team of developers to build large projects, and for a single person to build a smaller project." So the idea of an individual programmer or a small strike team being able to build software of virtually any size is very much part of the Lisp culture.
in networked environments. They were developed for use in early large networks like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the MIT. They were an early (starting mid 70s) step from time-shared hosts to personal networked workstations for developers.