Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1992 21:12 EST
From: Clinton Hyde <·····@pecos.ads.com>
In article <····················@SUMMER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> ···@sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com (Scott McKay) writes:
I find that examining the history of Symbolics proves instructive.
The two conclusions I have drawn are (1) it still makes sense from a
technical viewpoint, and (2) it is impossible to ignore the marketing
issues. It is unfortunate that we at Symbolics did such a poor job of
describing why our so-called "special purpose" hardware is so good at
supporting dynamic languages like Lisp; if we had done a better job,
the hardware we all use might be a lot better than it is today.
that's not all of it, Scott. if Symbolics had priced the machines at
$10k instead of $100k, they have probably cornered the market in a
year. single-user computers costing one-hundred-thousand dollars are
hard to justify under most circumstances.
Well, this isn't about the Lisp language any longer, so this will be my
last message on the subject. (You can all breath a sigh of relief.)
While I agree that the price of LispM's was an issue, I would like to
try to set the record a little more straight.
1) Only the LM-2 ever cost around $100K. The 36xx series prices started
out substantially lower than that ($80K), with (eventually) very usable
3620 configurations running about $36000. It is true that our high-end
XL's still cost more than that (you get tons of disk and memory for the
price), but again, very usable entry-level MacIvories cost much less.
2) If Symbolics had priced them at $10K, we would have gone out of
business long before cornering the market. No joke -- the production
cost of our Lisp machines was high because the number of machines we
made was very low, at least relative to the number of machines you need
to make to get quantities of scale.
I worked at TI for years, and was an early (pre-production) and
long-time user of Explorers, and it wasn't easy to justify buying them
in other divisions. they were too expensive in terms of capital money,
which is a lot more quantifiable than the unmeasurable producitivity
gain, which might or might not occur during the depreciation years.
the technical points are good, and on-target. the market competition
was a $10k Sun3, and the LispMs couldn't compete on dollars, and the
folks who make capital purchase decisions (who didn't care about the
lisp part) only saw $90k cost difference. it's damn tough to overcome
that.
There was never, ever a $90K price difference between LispM's and
Sun3's. Never. In fact, during the time that Sun3's started to become
increasingly popular, the cost of a Sun3 plus enough disk and memory to
run Common Lisp, plus the software license for Sun Lisp plus SPE (which
Sun was positioning against Symbolics) was *very close* to a pretty
hefty 36xx. The "$10K Sun3" of legend was short on memory and was
diskless; anybody who tried to use them for Lisp development (and I know
a bunch of people who did try) quickly had to upgrade to much more
expensive configurations.
Despite this, Lisp Machines were effectively painted as expensive when,
in actual fact, the price difference between Lisp machines and comparable
Sun workstations was negligible. It steams me to this day that LispM
manufacturers were never able to escape this lie, and I find it
distressing that a former TI employee actually believes the lie, too.
···@sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com (Scott McKay) writes:
>[...]
>There was never, ever a $90K price difference between LispM's and Sun3's.
>[Because of the cost to load up the Sun with memory and S/W to run LISP]
This part I agree with. You had to really load up a Sun to get a
decent LISP environment.
>Despite this, Lisp Machines were effectively painted as expensive when,
>in actual fact, the price difference between Lisp machines and comparable
>Sun workstations was negligible.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This part I don't. I bought both Symbolics and Suns to develop and run LISP,
both in ~1987 (3645's and Sun 3/160's) and in 1991-92 (XL1200's and
SparcStation 2's). Certainly the difference was never anywhere near $90K,
but both times I paid quite a bit (25-50%, maybe?) less for my Sun. Now, IMHO
this Sun (either time) was not as good a LISP development environment, but
that is my point. There WAS a price/productivity tradeoff, and I think Scott
is exaggerating to say there was essentially no price difference (and thus
Symbolics wins for productivity reasons). For many LISP developers, myself
included, it was worth paying the price penalty to get the productivity
gain, but that is quite different from saying there was no tradeoff.
- Marty
(setf (need-p 'disclaimer) NIL)