[SunRescue] Re: rescue digest, Vol 1 #1105 - 18 msgs

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, you wrote:
> wlewis at mailbag.com writes:
> >Then again, my idea of ideal hardware is an Xerox D-machine or a
> >Symbolics UX-1200 VME board for a Sun box(I'd damn near do anything
> > for one... Anyone here got one for sale???). Good as *nix is, the
> > real Lisp Machines blow it completely out of the water. To me, the
> > best DEC is/was a PDP-10 running Interlisp...  ;'p
>
> I've never seen a Symbolics VME board, though I had a suspicion such
> things existed. All of their stand-alone computers were nubus though,
> right?

Nope. "Lbus" and "Sbus" (a UK-based re-seller has some cards in stock). 
Don't many of the Symbolics machines pre-date Nubus ? Or am I mistaken 
in how old Nubus is ?

> I think it's odd that two of the most famous lisp environments were
> on PDP-10 and Symbolics hardware, both of which are 36-bit, but the
> word size is used for *completely* different reasons. Weird
> coincidence.

I must admit I'd always assumed that the PDP-10 and the MIT Lisp 
Machine were the same word size for ease of moving stuff across. Have 
you got any references for those differences ?

(another Lisp machine fan)