Lucid was founded because Symbolics was unbelievably expensive and unbelievably arrogant. “We will always be the best so you have no choice but to pay our prices, nobody can match our performance or technology.”

They wouldn’t even let a company decommissioning a workstation give it to an employee who wanted to take it home without paying about the cost of a Macintosh in “license transfer fees” and then whoever got it had to pay “maintenance” to stay within the letter of the license.

VLM is decent but they’d have been better off retargeting 80386 and 80486 atop either Unix or Windows, rather than trying to maintain their own special fancy architecture forever.

Ironically we are still catching up with what Lucid was pushing for C++ when they pivoted.

Also, once the Symbolics 3600 series was released in the early 1980s, Symbolics looked like they were just resting on their laurels relative to the rest of the industry. There weren’t binary-compatible performance improvements every year or two like the rest of the workstation industry was seeing, it took the rest of the decade to achieve that kind of improvement, and with only source compatibility, in the form of the XL series.

To do a bit of an apples to apples comparison, look at the Apollo and Sun workstation lines versus the Symbolics workstation line from 1983/4-1991/2. That takes you from the Apollo DN300, SUN-1, and Symbolics 3600, through the Apollo DN10000, Sun SPARCstation 2, and Symbolics XL1200. They all started at about 1 MIPS but ended at very different positions.