[jimwise]

Sure -- but they were beaten by ordinary machines because the combination of better ordinary machines and better techniques for running lisp on ordinary machines improved to the point where lisp machines weren't better at running lisp.

A lot of this is that a few small low-budget research groups were building lisp machines at a time when the big players suddenly started pouring all their efforts into developing commodity single-user graphical workstations. But it's also true that developments in GC technology -- developments which Torvalds seems unaware of in this 2002 post, even though they were 15-20 years old by then -- made GC really fast even on hardware not designed with GC in mind.