Lisp machine
In plain wordsA 1970s–1980s personal workstation built specially to run the AI programming language Lisp quickly. When ordinary computers caught up, the market collapsed, helping to bring on an AI winter.
A personal workstation of the 1970s and 1980s engineered from the processor up for LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades.: its hardware dealt directly with type-tagged data, fast function calls and garbage collection, and it came with large virtual memory, a bitmapped display and a programming environment written in Lisp itself. The first were built at the MIT AI Laboratory (the CONS and CADR machines, 1974–1979); Symbolics, Lisp Machines Inc., Xerox and Texas Instruments sold them from about 1980, and they became the standard platform for 1980s AI and expert systemexpert system, n.: A program that stores a human specialist's know-how as many if–then rules and uses them to give advice or make decisions in a narrow field, such as diagnosing infections or configuring computers. development. Around 1987 the market collapsed as cheaper general-purpose workstations from Sun Microsystems and others, and later personal computers, ran Lisp nearly as well; the collapse is a standard marker of the start of the second AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s..
The lab's Symbolics Lisp machines sat idle once its programs had been ported to Sun workstations.
Origin
Begun at MIT around 1974 by Richard Greenblatt and Tom Knight. The split of MIT's Lisp machine programmers into rival companies, Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc., is often cited as a spur to Richard Stallman's free software movement.
Usage note
Symbolics registered symbolics.com in March 1985, the first .com domain name.
Related
- LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades.
- AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.
- expert systemexpert system, n.: A program that stores a human specialist's know-how as many if–then rules and uses them to give advice or make decisions in a narrow field, such as diagnosing infections or configuring computers.
- Fifth Generation Computer Systems projectFifth Generation Computer Systems project, prop. n.: Japan's government-backed effort, from 1982 to 1992, to build a new kind of computer that reasons with logic using many processors at once. It fell short, but it alarmed other countries into launching AI programs of their own.
- symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.
Mentioned in
AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s., expert systemexpert system, n.: A program that stores a human specialist's know-how as many if–then rules and uses them to give advice or make decisions in a narrow field, such as diagnosing infections or configuring computers., LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades., Fifth Generation Computer Systems projectFifth Generation Computer Systems project, prop. n.: Japan's government-backed effort, from 1982 to 1992, to build a new kind of computer that reasons with logic using many processors at once. It fell short, but it alarmed other countries into launching AI programs of their own., MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL.