Lisp Machines

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Lisp Machines Inc. ( LMI for short ) was a manufacturer of Lisp machines , a specific type of computer . The LMI company was founded in 1979 by Richard Greenblatt in order to be able to further develop and produce those Lisp machines that he had already designed with other hackers at the MIT AI Lab.

The company went bankrupt in 1986, was bought by a Canadian investor and LMI tried a fresh start as GigaMos Systems . However, due to legal problems of the investor, GigaMos Systems also went bankrupt shortly after it was founded.

history

In 1973 Richard Greenblatt and Tom Knight began designing a Lisp machine. In 1976 they produced their first prototype with MIT CONS. After the project had been presented and received financial support from DARPA and other companies, it quickly became clear that a separate company had to be founded to develop and manufacture the Lisp machines. However, there were internal disputes about the planned business model. Greenblatt wanted to found a company that conformed to the MIT AI Lab's hacking ethics and would do without risk capital. However, Russell Noftsker advocated a traditional company. Since Noftsker already had experience in business life and there were personal differences between Greenblatt and some of the employees of the AI ​​Lab, Noftsker managed to get many employees on his side. In 1979 he founded Symbolics Inc. Greenblatt founded Lisp Machines Inc. later that year .

Lisp machines from LMI

  • LMI CADR - a repackaged MIT CADR .
  • LMI Lambda - licensed to Texas Instruments and sold as TI Explorer I.
  • LMI K-Machine - could no longer be published as LMI previously went bankrupt.

K-Machine

The K-Machine was the design of a completely new Lisp machine which, unlike the other Lisp machines, was no longer based on the MIT original design. The design began in late 1985 and was intended to compete with the Symbolics Ivory and TI Explorer microchips. The K-Machine was a 32-bit architecture (as opposed to the 36-bit architecture of the Symbolics machines) and was designed according to RISC principles.

Due to the bankruptcy of LMI and GigaMos Systems, the K-Machine could never be completed.

Web links

swell

  1. ^ A b Steven Levy: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution 1984, New York, ISBN 0-385-19195-2
  2. ↑ a b c d http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm
  3. ↑ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html