Lisp machine

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The Lisp Machines were general purpose computers designed (often with hardware support) to run Lisp as their main language.

History

In 1974 Richard Greenblatt at MIT started the MIT Lisp Machine Project. The first machine was called CONS (named after the list construction operator in Lisp); it was subsequently improved into a version called CADR (a pun; CADR returns the second element of a list). The CADR was later made into products by Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc (LMI). They ran ZetaLisp, descended from MIT's MacLisp. These machines had hardware support for various primitive lisp operations (tag testing, CDR coding) and also hardware support for incremental garbage collection. They ran Lisp programs very efficiently (at least the Symbolics ones did, I'm not sure about the LMI or CADR).

Meanwhile, Xerox produced machines which were designed to run InterLisp. These included the Xerox 1108, aka "Dandelion", and the Xerox 1109, aka "Dandetiger".

All these products are history, due to the speed of evolution of so-called "commodity hardware" (that is, generic computers) which wound up being able to run Lisp faster than Lisp machines even without special purpose hardware.