I wouldn't say they were not commercially successful. In their market they must have generated sales of hard- and software of a billion dollars (dollars of the 80s). Was the Commodore C64 not successful, just because it is no longer used?
For it to be useful, it should support some sorts of parallel-processing capabilities that conventional CPUs don't have. Perhaps pmap and preduce as SIMD instructions.
A Lisp Machine can be useful without that or with different architectures. In those days there were quite a few attempts to speed up Lisp. Thinking Machines sold the ultimate Lisp accelerator: the Connection Machine. Stuff like that was mind-blowing and mind-blowing expensive.
Remember, a useful Lisp Machine in the early 90s had a 40 Mhz cpu with 40bit architecture, a graphics accelerator for a second screen, 40 or more megabytes of memory, a 400 MB disk, 10Mbit/sec Ethernet, 5 Mbit/sec SCSI, ...
Today we get already multiples of those numbers for tiny money and a 64bit processor. Lisp runs nicely when implemented natively.
Comments
I wouldn't say they were not commercially successful. In their market they must have generated sales of hard- and software of a billion dollars (dollars of the 80s). Was the Commodore C64 not successful, just because it is no longer used?
A Lisp Machine can be useful without that or with different architectures. In those days there were quite a few attempts to speed up Lisp. Thinking Machines sold the ultimate Lisp accelerator: the Connection Machine. Stuff like that was mind-blowing and mind-blowing expensive.
Remember, a useful Lisp Machine in the early 90s had a 40 Mhz cpu with 40bit architecture, a graphics accelerator for a second screen, 40 or more megabytes of memory, a 400 MB disk, 10Mbit/sec Ethernet, 5 Mbit/sec SCSI, ...
Today we get already multiples of those numbers for tiny money and a 64bit processor. Lisp runs nicely when implemented natively.