Symbolics LispM's - What might have been
Thursday, June 10, 2004
On comp.lang.lisp, there was a discussion about why Lisp Machines didn't succeed. A common assumption in the past has been that they were superceded by commodity workstations that offered equivalent (or superior) performance but cost a fraction of the price (Note: the book The Brain Makers is an interesting read about the history of LispMs). Christopher Stacy provided a different perspective on why Symbolics (probably the best known LispM vendor) failed:
"The reason the Lisp Machine vendors went out of business varies by vendor. In the case of Symbolics, it had mostly to do with business issues (eg. real estate deals) rather than Lisp Machines. I think that in an analysis of the failure of the company, the impact of any performance issues (or any technical issues) were totally in the noise. But all the vendors were devastated by the 'AI Winter' in which anything with the words 'AI' or 'Lisp' was anathama.Interesting perspective on the history of Lisp Machines. It makes you want to speculate:
Shortly before Symbolics finally went under for the last time, it had new RISC chips that were going to blow the socks off the latest SPARC chips. This was the 'S' Machine aka the 'SUN killer', but it never saw the light of day. Technical issues, including competing in the CPU market against the big boys, was not the problem. Another unfortunate casualty of the culmination of a bad business situation.
The last thing I worked on for Symbolics was an embedded real-time packaging of the current Ivory chip, and that Lisp Machine was plenty 'fast enough' for that, featuring impressive guaranteed response times. (This was not Genera - it was a new extended-ANSI-CL operating system.) The customer was very happy with the product, but it was killed for entirely political reasons. (And the company was already almost entirely down the tubes by that point.)
The last ditch effort was to make an all-software port of Genera, running on a virtual Lisp Machine - an Ivory byte-code interpreter for the DEC Alpha running under Unix. Because it all fit in the cache, this ran like a bat out of hell. It was competitive with (eg. could beat) native Alpha implementations of Lisp, and was about an order of magnitude faster than the Ivory hardware. (This was on the fastest hardware of the day, much faster than the SPARC chips, with Intel computers were even worth mentioning.) Again, performance was not the issue.
Symbolics could have been a viable niche vendor, if they had been able to stay in business long enough. They could also have been a commodity player, but corporate and technical stragegies would have had to have been different from a much earlier timepoint. Maybe they could have survived 'AI Winter', but that would have only been possible with some amazing foresight.
Anyone who thinks that the failure of Symbolics was due to hardware or software performance issues must have never studied the company's financials or done much historical analysis of the market.
It's just another version of the 'Lisp is slow' myth.
Too bad that a quarter of a century ago we Lisp Machine guys were naive technocrats who didn't know anything fundamental about business, I think we all know by now that business success has practically nothing to do with technical product quality. However, I don't imagine that this obvious fact is taught in engineering schools today, either. It's not something that scientists and engineers like to hear."
- What if Symbolics had been better managed as a business?
- What if the "S" Machine technology had reached the market?
- What if the new extended-ANSI-CL operating system had been marketed properly - would there be a 3rd major OS today?
- What if ...
