Symbolics and the Lisp machine business

By the mid-1970s the programs written at the MIT AI Laboratory had outgrown the time-shared computers they ran on, and Richard Greenblatt and Thomas Knight designed a single-user workstation with hardware support for Lisp: tagged memory, a microcoded processor, a large bitmapped display. In 1980 the laboratory's Lisp machine became two companies. Symbolics, founded by Russell Noftsker, hired most of the lab's hackers; Greenblatt's Lisp Machines Inc. took the rest. Richard Stallman, left behind, spent two years reimplementing Symbolics' improvements for LMI and then founded the free software movement.

For a few years Lisp machines were the best personal computers in the world, and the expert-systems industry ran on them. Symbolics was the first company to register a .com domain, in March 1985. Texas Instruments and Xerox sold competing machines.

The market was gone by 1988. Sun workstations and ordinary PCs ran Lisp well enough for a fraction of the price, and the expert systems that had justified the hardware were being cancelled. The collapse of the specialised AI hardware business, about half a billion dollars of it, is the usual date given for the start of the second winter.