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Re:The Philosophy of Computer Science by galaxyLogic on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @12:08AM (#34876913)
> Lisp environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp machines

I think it was just that it became clear the projects didn't deliver anything very useful. You can't keep the hype up very long if it can't be backed up by real applications.

But some good stuff that got started then prevailed, like speech understanding and language translation. But it didn't come usable overnight.

Classic AI was a reasonable research program, but research takes time. Think of nuclear fusion.

Re:The Philosophy of Computer Science by lispm on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @02:54AM (#34878119)
It took a while to get there. One would think of end 80s / early 90s. Remember, there were probably only around 10000 (ten thousand, not ten thousands) Lisp Machines ever produced. A 40 bit Ivory 3 processor from Symbolics was basically slightly faster than a Motorola 68030 processor, but with larger memory capabilites. Memory was expensive on stock hardware, too - but not as expensive as the 48bit wide ECC memory on a Lisp Machine. Add to that a Megapixel screen, a large disk, a tape drive, a faster graphics card,...

There was little point investing money into a hardware market which did not produce cheaper and/or faster machines, given the small market.

There were a lot of interesting applications development on Lisp Machines, but there was no point to deliver them on that expensive hard- and software. Development environments were catching up. So a $50k ART expert system development system was replaced by a low-cost CLIPS on machines with less hardware/software costs. It also moved away from Lisp, as Lisp was extremely unpopular (and with almost no funding left) in the 90s.

Nowadays a Lisp on a M2 processor from Apple is 1000 times fast than on the Lisp Machine from 1990. That's just a single CPU, we are not even talking about GPU or Neural network chips. Expensive 40 MB main memory from then is now 8 GB entry level.