[rescue] Head for a SparcStation 2

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 09:26:01 -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Jochen Kunz wrote:
> > A Symbolics machine, what else? ;-)
> 
> How about a Texas Instruments AI Explorer?  On the offchance you've
> never run across one, the AI Explorer's native machine code was LISP.

Both the Explorer, the Symbolics machines, and their common ancestor the
MIT Lisp Machine had an architecture very suited to running LISP, but
you couldn't quite say that the native machine code was LISP itself. I
dare say primitives such as 'car' and 'cdr' were single instructions,
but it was still necessary to compile LISP code to get it running (or
run it via the interpreter).

I *think* the Symbolics Lisp machine was a direct descendant of the MIT
Lisp Machine, whereas the Explorer was designed from scratch with the
help of some of the original Lisp Machine architects. But I'm frequently
wrong :)

The later versions of Genera were amazing development environments ...
sufficiently so that even a system administrator with delusions of
grandeur (like me) could become a productive developer.