Photos are indeed sparse, here's the highest-res I could find of the machine I saw at the museum (built 1979, much more compact now that we can forego the vacuum tubes), thankfully there are enough pixels to read the post-it note naming the machine "Marvin": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/MIT_lisp...

> I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive.

My intuition is that back then getting run time on computers was so scarce that the best programmers and mathematicians spent a great deal of brain time considering exactly what their software should be. If you only get one run a day, if that, you're gonna do your best to make it count. Today we're often in the opposite situation, where it can be entirely rational to burn incredible amounts of computation in the absolute sense to save brain time.

> I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive.

I have a much bigger emotional conflict when contrasting that with the current state of mainstream programming languages, that are only just beginning to tread onto territories like algebraic data types and pattern matching that ML paved almost 50 years ago. Is there any hope for true dependent typing to become popular before 2040?

Don't Prolog and Erlang have pattern matching built in??

Lean4 comes pretty close to a general purpose dependently typed programming language.

I can't give you a great answer because I wasn't there, but I did find a John McCarthy paper describing its usage by way of an automatic typewriter [0] as referenced by the wiki on Lisp [1], first implemented via punchcards on the IBM 704. That would be vacuum tube logic and magnetic core memory. ~19,000 pounds, 12k flops (36bit), 18kB of RAM, 3.75-ish Megabytes of storage per 2,400 feet of mylar tape. [2]

As for languages ahead of the hardware, you might read up about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the latter a mathematician who translated problems into machine instructions for a machine that wouldn't be built for a hundred years - Babbage's design worked, but he spent all the money the Royal Society was willing to give trying improve the tolerances on his logical-clockwork. [3] But anyway, back to John McCarthy's paper, last page:

  APPENDIX - HUMOROUS ANECDOTE

The first on-line demonstration of LISP was also the first of a precursor of time-sharing that we called “time-stealing”. The audience comprised the participants in one of M.I.T.’s Industrial Liaison Symposia on whom it was important to make a good impression. A Flexowriter had been connected to the IBM 704 and the operating system modified so that it collected characters from the Flexowriter in a buffer when their presence was signalled by an interrupt. Whenever a carriage return occurred, the line was given to LISP for processing. The demonstration depended on the fact that the memory of the computer had just been increased from 8192 words to 32768 words so that batches could be collected that presumed only a small memory.

The demonstration was also one of the first to use closed circuit TV in order to spare the spectators the museum feet consequent on crowding around a terminal waiting for something to happen. Thus they were on the fourth floor, and I was in the first floor computer room exercising LISP and speaking into a microphone. The problem chosen was to determine whether a first order differential equation of the form M dx + N dy was exact by testing whether ΔM/Δy = ΔM /Δy, which also involved some primitive algebraic simplification. Everything was going well, if slowly, when suddenly the Flexowriter began to type (at ten characters per second) “THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR HAS BEEN CALLED. SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS ARE AS FOLLOWS:” and on and on and on.

The garbage collector was quite new at the time, we were rather proud of it and curious about it, and our normal output was on a line printer, so it printed a full page every time it was called giving how many words were marked and how many were collected and the size of list space, etc. During a previous rehearsal, the garbage collector hadn’t been called, but we had not refreshed the LISP core image, so we ran out of free storage during the demonstration.

[0] http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704

[3] Jacquard's Web by James Essinger is the book you want to read for more.