Update: freiheit.com sponsors room, food and drinks (Thanks!). Probably almost twenty people (including some well known Lisp people) will attend.
Update: We were 28 people and it was a very nice evening. Stefan Richter has some Fotos from the event. Hans Hübner was there and showed a brand new adapter to connect the Symbolics keyboard to a PS2 connector (even using a PS2-to-USB converter to connect it to an USB port). Edi talked about Piano and gave a demo (constructing an aircraft). He will give a separate LispWorks CAPI talk at some other meeting.
Edi Weitz will talk about an application that he ported to LispWorks. The application is called Piano 5.0. Edi will also talk a bit about CAPI, the graphics toolkit of LispWorks. Using CAPI allows the developer to deliver GUI-based software on Windows, Mac OS X and X11/Motif without (many) changes.
Jens Teich asked me to give a demo of the Symbolics Lisp Machine.
So, I will give a talk about the Symbolics Lisp Machine. I will demo two real Lisp Machines (a MacIvory 3 and a NXP1000). You would get the chance to see a working MacIvory 3 with a Lisp Machine keyboard. The NXP1000 is a full Lisp Machine (without graphics card) in a pizza box. Get in contact with me (use the Feedback form below or send email) if you are interested in that talk/demo and have specific requests. I try to spend most my time with the live demonstration, because few people have seen these machines running in real life. You can read some of the material here on the site (http://lispm.dyndns.org) as a background and see some of the movies.
A single MacIvory 3 (including the Mac) once cost $29000. Nowadays you can get one for $3200 from Symbolics (via David Schmidt). The original price for the NXP1000 was $18700. The NXP1000 is extremely rare - it could cost $4000 or more. The prices also include a Genera license with most of its source code. The MacIvory 3 board I have once was used for a maintenance scheduling system at a power plant. The NXP1000 originally came from a Telco.
Also, make sure you don't miss Edi's talk. The Hamburg Lisp group meets every last wednesday of the month. This time the meeting is at freiheit.com. See the meeting annoucement for more details.
Here is some background on the History of the Lisp Machine:
The picture shows the Lisp Machines that were derived from the initial design of the CONS developed at the MIT. The Racal-Norsk KPS and the LMI K-Machine did not make it into products. The Symbolics Sunstone RISC processor was fully designed, but also never went into production. Both were new processor designs and architecturally not a descendant of the MIT CONS Lisp Machine. The Racal-Norsk KPS was an independent computer design based on some Norsk computer and was supposed to run ZetaLisp.
There were lots of different models of Lisp Machines developed and sold. It is difficult to say how many Lisp Machines have been sold, but the number should be near ten thousand. I would estimate that Symbolics during its lifetime has sold hardware, software and services for more than 550 Million dollars. In 1991 Symbolics was claiming that it had more than 6000 installations. Add to that the sales of TI, LMI and Xerox.
The first models were all single-user workstations (though networked). The Symbolics 3653 was a machine that combined three Lisp Machines in one cabinet. The Texas Instruments Explorer LX combined a Lisp Machine with a Unix subsystem. The Texas Instruments Microexplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory then were small Nubus boards for the Apple Macintosh II. With the new microprocessors (one from TI and one from Symbolics) it was possible to build much smaller, even embedded, Lisp Machines. The UX-boards from Symbolics then were embedded into a SUN host server. It was possible to put more than one UX-board into a SUN. The Symbolics Zora was a very special system. It was an embedded Lisp Machine running a new operating system (Minima) and was designed for AT&T (Lucent) for an ATM switch. The ATM switch had several of these boards and on the board ran the switching software on top of the real-time OS. The hardware design then had been used for the Symbolics NXP1000 headless Lisp Machine. Symbolics then developed an emulator for the Ivory architecture running on the DEC Alpha processor. This was the last official development. There have been attempts to emulate the TI Explorer, there is an emulator for the MIT CADR (including source code of its Lisp Machine Lisp based OS) and there is an emulator for the Ivory that runs on the Intel x86-64 processor.
Over time Symbolics increased the word size from 32bit, to 36bit and then finally to 40bit. This enabled larger address spaces and larger native data sizes. Symbolics also supported and used several bus types. The XL and UX machines used the VMEbus, which made them relatively large, though smaller integration would have been possible without the VMEbus. TI was using the Nubus for the Explorer and LMI used the Nubus for the LMI Lambda (later the Nubus went also into the Apple Macintosh II and the NeXTstation). LMI got the Nubus from TI and in exchange TI got the Lambda Lisp Machine architecture from LMI. Symbolics used the Nubus for the MacIvory (since it had to fit into an Apple Macintosh II). There were some talks with Sony to build a board for the new Sony NEWS computer, but no results were visible. Later there was also a company interested in using the Ivory chip for a handheld pen computer. Probably there was some development in that direction, but the later product of that company did not use the Ivory.
A few facts about Symbolics:
Founded: 1980.
Incorporated: 1985.
Revenue 1985: 69 Million Dollars. 1 Million Dollar profit.
Revenue 1986: 114.2 Million Dollars. 10 Million Dollar profit.
Revenue 1987: 103.7 Million Dollars. 25 Million Dollar loss.
Revenue 1988: 81.1 Million Dollars. 46 Million Dollar loss.
Revenue 1989: 67 Million Dollars. 1.8 Million Dollar profit.
Revenue 1990: 53 Million Dollars. 6 Million Dollar loss.
Revenue 1991: 40 Million Dollars. 10 Million Dollar loss.
Employees beginning of 1984: 300
Employees 1986: more than 900
Employees 1988: 400, down from 625
Employees 1993: 70
Maximum number of employees: 1000.
Maximum number of software engineers: 250.
First registered .com domain: symbolics.com in 1985.
Numbers of transistor functions on the Ivory microprocessor: 390000.
CEO from 1980 to 1981: Robert P. Adams.
CEO from 1981 to 1988: Russel Noftsker.
CEO from 1988 to 1991: Jay Wurtz.
CEO from 1991: Kenneth J. Tarpey
CEO from 1995: Russel Noftsker
CEO from 1997 to 1998: David K. Schmidt
Bankruptcy filed: 28. January 1993
Bought by Princeton Capital Finance Co. in 1995
Bought by Andrew Topping in 1998
Andrew Topping died in 2005. No new owner since then.
The other main branch of Lisp Machines were developed by Xerox. It was a completely independent design and
was based on InterLisp. The development environment is famous, but the machines were (mostly) underpowered.
Especially limiting was the small address space. The Xerox Dorado might have been an exception - it was a very
special machine using ECL (emitter-coupled logic). In 1986 Xerox mentioned that they had a project running for
some time that was developing a new RISC-based microprocessor for Common Lisp: the CLP. The processor
and machines based on it was never released. The use of the Interlisp-D system declined. One reason was
that Common Lisp (a standard promoted also by DARPA) was very different from InterLisp - though Xerox
also integrated their version of Common Lisp into the InterLisp-D environment.