Lisp Machines were in development and use from the mid 70s to the early 90s. They were a reaction to the increasing demands of Lisp software when only expensive time-sharing systems with too small address spaces were available. Applications like Macsyma were getting too large. In the early 70s Xerox PARC developed the interactive workstation. Soon AI researchers at Xerox PARC and the MIT AI Lab adapted this new invention to Lisp. At Xerox PARC the InterLisp system got ported to the new machines in form of a full operating system. The MIT AI Lab developed a new machine and its software, the CONS. This design then was the first in a whole line of machines from Lisp Machines Incorporated, Symbolics, Texas Instruments and others. The Lisp Machine also served as the frontend for parallel computers like the Connection Machine, the BBN Butterfly computer and specialized computers like the Pixar Image processor.
Here is a timeline for some popular Lisp Machine makes. Scroll down, for the ten documents.
I have selected ten documents that describe the basic ideas and the real developed/sold commercial systems of Symbolics, TI, Xerox and Thinking Machines.
At the end of the 1980s the funding from DARPA went away and standard computers were powerful enough to run the larger Lisp applications. Lisp Machines only survived as emulators or in museums. Unfortunately the emulators can not capture the feeling of truly integrated hard- and software of a Lisp workstation. The early Lisp Machines were not only platforms for research software, but also for hardware.
Here are ten documents that are giving some perspective on Lisp Machines:
1. Richard Greenblatt, MIT AI Lab, THE LISP MACHINE, November 1974, PDF
The original vision of a Lisp-based workstation as a personal computer designed for interactive use.
2. Bawden/Greenblatt/Holloway/Knight/Moon/Weinreb, MIT AI Lab, LISP Machine Progress Report, August 1977, PDF
This paper describes the progress in the MIT AI Lab Lisp Machine project since its start in 1974.
3. Lisp Machine Manual, MIT AI Lab, July 1981, Fourth Edition, PDF
This manual mostly describes the language 'Lisp Machine Lisp' and its implementation.
This dialect of Lisp has been enhanced with facilities that are necessary to write an operating system in Lisp.
Later this language was a major influence on the design of Common Lisp.
4. Curtis B. Roads, Symbolics, 3600 Technical Summary, Febuary 1983, PDF
This extensive document describes the hardware and software of the Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine.
The 3600 is a large personal Lisp workstation and it is extremely extensible with plenty space
for disks, tapes and extension boards. The 3600 took a long time to develop and was the first
computer designed by Symbolics. Symbolics sold a repackaged CADR before the 3600.
The 3600 introduced also the 36bit architecture (up from 32 and 24 bits) for larger
address spaces.
5. Artificial Intelligence Systems, InterLisp-D: A Friendly Primer, Xerox, November 1986, PDF
The InterLisp-D operating system for Xerox' Lisp Machines provide a unique development
environment. It also shows the influence of Smalltalk (which ran as a different operating system on the
same hardware. Code is edited with structure editors and the source code is managed by the
development environment. Extensive cross reference capabilities (Masterscope), interactive interfaces (DWIM),
window management (ROOMS) were some of the highlights.
6. Benjamin Zorn, Paul Hilfinger, Kinson Ho, James Larus, University of California, SPUR Lisp: Design and Implementation, January 1987, PDF
SPUR Lisp was a Common Lisp on a new multi-processor RISC-based Lisp Machine. This paper describes the design and
implementation of SPUR Lisp itself.
7. Texas Instruments, Explorer Technical Summary, August 1988, PDF
For a few years Texas Instruments was in the Lisp Machine business. They married the NuBus with the
Lisp Machine design from LMI and developed a range of Lisp Machines. TI also developed
their own 32bit microprocessor for their Lisp Machines. The operating system
and the software was also based on the original MIT AI Lisp Machine.
8. Thinking Machines Corporation, Getting Started in *Lisp, June 1991, PDF
Imagine a SIMD (single instruction multiple data) coprocessor with 65536 CPUs added to your Symbolics Lisp Machine.
Sounds crazy? The Connection Machine from Thinking Machines Corporation was just that.
This manual explains how to program the Connection Machine in *Lisp.
9. Abelson/Berlin/Katzenelson/McAllister/Rozas/Sussman/Wisdom, MIT, The Supercomputer Toolkit: A General Framework for Special-Purpose Computing, 1992, PDF
This paper presents a special-purpose computer running simulation software in Scheme.
10. Robert A MacLachlan, CMU, Lisp vs. RISC or What Common Lisp Implementors Really Want, 1993, PDF
Lisp Machines went out of fashion. What remained was some kind of felt mismatch of 'normal' RISC and CISC architectures
with the needs of native-code Lisp implementations. Lisp nowadays runs 'fast enough' on current architectures.
But still implementors would like to get a little bit of support for Lisp-like languages. This
paper explores what support that would be.