Get the latest tech news

Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated

Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago...

Built from TTL logic, the CPU ran at a nominal 5MHz and many primitives could execute in a single clock cycle, but a lack of word prefetch, a four-cycle minimum penalty for main memory access and a few complex microcoded instructions reduced performance from that theoretical maximum by around thirty percent on average. LMI hedged its bets by offering a 68000 option and Unix, which could even run simultaneously with Lisp, but the company only ended up selling around 200 of the LAMBDAs and became so starved for cash that Texas Instruments agreed to license the architecture in return for a 25 percent corporate stake. As this is an HFS folder, that means changing it in the Namespace Editor, which is the normal way you'd edit a site in Genera, or tricks like directly invoking(tcp:initialize-internet-namespace) will fail hard: at best you'll get filesystem impedance mismatches saying it can't write attribute:AUTHOR or some such, and at worst it will solidly bug out into the FEP.

Get the Android app