Here on Irreal, I often claim that Emacs is best thought of as a light weight Lisp Machine. One of the problems of being a gray beard is that it’s easy to forget that not everyone has your frame of reference. Things that seem quotidian to me are new concepts to younger members of our community.
One such concept, it seems, is the notion of a Lisp Machine. If you’ve been around a while, that term refers to a specific tangible thing that actually existed. Some younger engineers lack that frame of reference and don’t understand what the term refers to.
Lisp Machines were, of course, actual computers that ran Lisp natively in vaguely the same way that current machines run C natively. The OS and probably all the applications were written in Lisp on hardware that had explicit support for the Lisp language. They were meant to support research in artificial intelligence and other hard problems of the day.
At the link, Fit-Page-6206FUMA takes the term to mean a program that has a Lisp interpreter and wonders if we couldn’t have a, say, Lua or Java, machine. An actual Java machine would need hardware support for the Java language. That’s why I also say Emacs is a light weight Lisp machine. There’s no hardware support for Elisp; everything is done in software. Still, if you squint a bit you can almost believe you’re on a Lisp machine when you’re running Emacs.
One could claim that Emacs is a pale imitation of a real Lisp Machine and that’s probably true but it’s still so much better than everything else out there.