- From the wikipedia article on Symbolics and LMI
- LISt Processing Language (LISP)
- John McCarthy created it for Artificial Intelligence research
- Developed on an IBM 704 mainframe eventually was ported
- Very resource intensive
- Slowed shared machines to a crawl, making research very expensive in clock cycles
- Slow performance led to the idea of a dedicated machine for LISP
- John McCarthy created it for Artificial Intelligence research
- The Dedicated LISP machine ’73
- Tom Knight and Richard Greenblatt create CONS
- Hardwired to run basic LISP operations, speeding things up because they were in hardware not software
- CONS is further refined and becomes CADR
- Eventually 25 machines of this design are built and sold around MIT and outside MIT
- Russ Noftsker steps in when it’s obvious there’s a market for LISP
- Tom Knight and Richard Greenblatt create CONS
- Symbolics – February ’79
- Russ Noftsker & the largest contingent of AI hackers leave
- Most successful of the Lisp Machine companies
- Most innovative designs (higher performance, graphics division)
- Dedicated graphics were adopted by Hollywood led to further use of graphics in movies
- Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) – October ’79
- Richard Greenblatt
- Smallest contingent of the AI Lab hackers followed
- Orders were provided through Control Data Corp project trying to do AI research
- Richard Stallman – GNU Project
- Richard and Marvin Minsky were the only staff left after the parting of the ways
- Saw the culture get killed by the forming of the Lisp Machine
- GNU project formed as a response to decimation of MIT hacker ranks
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 