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LISP Machines

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hunterjwizzard

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A series of fascinating clicks last night got me reading about the old Lisp machines of the 60s and 70s. I'm curious if its possible to reproduce these machines today using off the shelf components, or if they relied on custom parts that don't exist anymore?

Apparently the original machines are quite rare, they only ever made about 7,000 of them.
 
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I have never heard of this machine, something American? Links would be welcome. IMHO at least schematics are needed. Or a machine that can be re-engineered. And what is known of the software? Once known, the hardware can be discussed. (No, I don't need another projects but I'm always tempted by these kind of things)
 
I think I remember reading somewhere that they were built using gate arrays - so (essentially) bespoke silicon. There will be documentation on the internet to support / refute that statement if you do a bit more research.

EDIT: The link above seems to state that the earlier machines were largely made out of TTL! They certainly refer to the 74181 4-bit ALU...

That is a very interesting link. I will give the text a more thorough read this afternoon. It seems to include a link to a schematic also. I have not investigated that yet.

You can buy a 'modern' lisp machine (using an eZ80 CPU) and uLisp is available fir a range of microcontrollers - so a "poor man's" lisp machine!

Dave
 
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Well and lisp runs just fine on any modern PC. Its just the purpose built hardware I find fascinating.
 
Recreating a Lisp Machine in hardware would be a trick. But I think all of those machines have active simulators and VMs to play with today.
 
There is an active discussion of LISPMs on the cctalk Discord
The origins are in the CONS and CADR architectures at the MIT AI Lab in the 70s.
TI built systems decsended from the CADR, Symbolics and LMI were commercial spinouts from MIT AI
Xerox built microcoded lisp machines based on D-Machine hardware
TI and Symbolics built CPUs in ASICs, the rest of the machines were discrete ICs.
Several microcode-level LISPM simulators exist.
 
Wikipedia says only about 7,000 lisp machines were built, so I can't imagine they used many proprietary chips.
 
Well, that is the total number of actual builds/sales.

They may have been expecting to sell 7,000,000 machines of course!

Dave
 
There were some fun debates within the Lisp community between those demanding specialized hardware that was as fast as possible no matter the cost and those wanting capable Lisps that could run on affordable hardware. The market for dedicated Lisp machines collapsed in the late 80s. It became too expensive to design a specialized CPU just to handle the small Lisp market. One of the Lisp machine vendors was making most of their revenue from training while losing money on hardware.
 
Of course, there was the Western Digital Pascal Micro engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine) that could run UCSD Pascal.

This (I believe) used the LSI-11 chipset - but with modified microcode. It seems dated from 1979 onward.

There was also the AMD 2900 bitslice processor that dated from 1975 - so (in principle) there is no reason why they couldn't have gone for a bespoke processor.

Dave
 
I'm pretty sure they published a paper on the architecture of a dedicated-silicon LM CPU, but it's been an age since I last looked into this...
 
hunterjwizzard said:
A series of fascinating clicks last night got me reading about the old Lisp machines of the 60s and 70s. I'm curious if its possible to reproduce these machines today using off the shelf components, or if they relied on custom parts that don't exist anymore?

Apparently the original machines are quite rare, they only ever made about 7,000 of them.
Click to expand...
There are emulators for the Symbolics 36xx series, for the TI Explorer and the MIT / LMI based machines as well. They should run well on anything PC/Mac desktop or laptop, made in the last 12 years at the least, and on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 also.
 
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