time to bring back the Lisp machines?

About 16 years ago, I had a rare and not to be repeated
opportunity to be in a room which in which Symbolics,
Texas Instruments and a company called (I think) 4th
Wave were showing off their Lisp machines. The
occassion was Europal '90.

There were also software vendors - a bald guy showing off
Mu Lisp from Soft Warehouse and Harlequin showing
off their Common Lisp.

Well I tested each and every one of them on a bubble sort
algorithm. And the results were interesting. Basically
the Lisp machines were faster than the software vendors,
but only by a fairly small margin of 2 or less. And in 1990,
with PCs and workstations leapfrogging in performance,
that meant only one thing - curtains for Lisp machines.
LM vendors just could not compete with the big chip
manufacturers.

Fast forward now to 2006 and things look very different.
We've not seen much improvement in processor speed
since 2003. Intel's Prescott chip turned out to be the
world's most expensive toaster. Hence the factor that
killed off the LMs is now out of play. So is anybody out
there considering that LMs might have some future in
today's market?

Mark

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