Anyone who’s been around Irreal for a while knows of my fascination with Lisp Machines. Part of my love or Emacs is that it’s (sort of) a reimagining of the Lisp Machines. Sadly, I never had a chance to work on an actual Lisp Machine but my fascination and love for them continues.
The idea of the Lisp machine is that although it had pretty much standard hardware components, it had specialized microcode that optimized it for running Lisp. For me, the real win was the software more than the hardware. That software still exists but is encumbered so it’s not available without a steep payment or a bit of piracy. That means that for those who, like me, love the idea of the Lisp Machine, the closest we’re going to get is Emacs.
Ketrainis over at Asianometry has an excellent video that recounts the history of the Lisp machines from their birth to their demise. They were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times slower than today’s cheap laptop but they were built by and for hackers and everything was user customizable just as with Emacs. Even the microcode could be reprogrammed. Joe Marshall has a great post that describes his reprogramming the Lisp Machne microcode to break DES.
This customizability was a huge benefit that every Emacs user will identify with. If the software didn’t support what you needed it to do, you could simply change it—even at the microcode level—to get the behavior you needed.
Ketrainis’ video is 45 minutes, 21 seconds longs so you’ll definitely need to schedule some time but if you have any interest in Lisp Machines, it’s worth your while.