Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run
Lisp as their main
software language, usually through hardware support. They are an example of a
high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they were the first commercial single-user
workstations. Despite being modest in number (perhaps 7,000 units total as of 1988), Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies – including effective
garbage collection,
laser printing,
windowing systems,
computer mice, high-resolution
bit-mapped graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations like
Chaosnet. Several companies built and sold Lisp Machines in the 1980s:
Symbolics (3600, 3640, XL1200, MacIvory, and other models),
Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI Lambda),
Texas Instruments (
Explorer and MicroExplorer), and
Xerox (
Interlisp-D workstations). The operating systems were written in
Lisp Machine Lisp,
InterLisp (Xerox), and later partly in
Common Lisp.