[jandrese]

There were honest to god LISP machines built back in the day. They never really caught on however. They were mostly oriented at the educational market, and didn't ship with such niceties like an OS or even a bootloader sometimes.

[jpt4]

>> the mechanisms are totally separated from the physical reality.

> There were honest to god LISP machines

As LISP-flavored stack machines, yes [0]. Alas that Linear Lisp [1] never received a hardware implementation [2].

To those exploring high level language architectures, forget not also the noble SCHEME-79 chip [3]: a Von Neumannian register machine, but one which executes a SCHEME interpreter microcoded in LISP.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Technical_overvie...

[1] http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/LinearLisp.html

[2] http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ForthStack.html

[3] http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6334