The Register published this fascinating article. It's a reread of the history of computing with a focus on Lisp, Lisp Machines, and early workstations:
I love how Dan Weinreb's reasons for why #Symbolics didn't succeed doesn't even consider their hostility towards free and open development of #LispMachine software as having something to do with it.
could it be that the #Symbolics dream was little more than the infantile wish that compels the subject to undermine their personal wish-fulfillment, ie the Freudian death drive?
in other words, shouldn't the dream be to see #LispMachines succeed, rather than one particular (corporate, commercial) realization of it?
He started the Cyc project, using Lisp Machines as a development environment. The project is roughly since 40 years ongoing. Cyc was the dream of a large-scale knowledge base of common sense knowledge. One that has many ways of reasoning and making inferences. It used SubL a variant of Common Lisp.
The ultimate yak shave: to implement its last generation of #LispMachines, Symbolics developed a complete #EDA toolset in #CommonLisp called NS that enabled them to design and verify their ASICs, gate arrays, and boards from architecture to photomasks for manufacturing.
The reason Schemers insist on saying Scheme is "Lisp" is that they want to get exclusive membership to the #SmugLispWeenie club. But thankfully, it is guarded by #LispMachines.
It's an incredible historical archive on Lisp systems and dialects with a focus on Symbolics Lisp Machines. It hosts countless manuals, research papers and publications, screenshots, videos, source code, documentation, articles, data, links, and other rare material.
Medley Interlisp has the most tightly integrated combination of system software, application platform, programming language, development environment, tools, and runtime platform I've ever experienced.
A rare "whole greater than the sum of its parts" level of synergy mostly seen only on Smalltalk workstations and Lisp Machines.