"Old man yells at Lisp Machines (And their enthusiasts)"

Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long.

They showed signs that some people there understood that their development environment was it, but it obviously never fully got through to decision-makers: They had CLOE, a 386 PC deployment story in partnership with Gold Hill, but they’d have been far better served by acquiring Gold Hill and porting Genera to the 386 PC architecture.

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.”

What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

Time to dig up a classic story about Tom Knight, who designed the first prototype of the Lisp Machine at MIT in the mid-70's. It's in the form of a classic Zen koan. This copy comes from https://jargondb.org/some_ai_koans but I've seen plenty of variations floating around.

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

The Lisp environments are definitely around, in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

You may try CADR (precursor to Genera) on-line: https://lispcafe.org/cadr/usim.html