Lisp Machine
Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed (usually through hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number (perhaps 7,000 units total as of 1988), Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies – including effective garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations like CHAOSNet. Several companies were building and selling Lisp Machines in the 1980s: Symbolics (3600, 3640, XL1200, MacIvory and other models), Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI Lambda), Texas Instruments (Explorer and MicroExplorer) and Xerox (InterLisp-D workstations). The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, InterLisp (Xerox) and later partly in Common Lisp.
Read more about Lisp Machine: Technical Overview
Famous quotes containing the words lisp and/or machine:
“Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word,”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)