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by exsf0859 2020 days ago
Pretty sure the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704 was the first Lisp machine (as CAR, CDR come from register names on the 704...)

But DEC did rule academic computing well into the 80s.

1 comments

Yes, I believe it was the first machine Lisp ran on though that was before my time.

But the PDP-6 was a different class of device as every machine word was (could store) a cons; the common list manipulation functions (not just car and cdr but rplaca et al) were actual machine instructions etc (even if the names were different, e.g. CAR was HLRZ, as I can still remember).

In other words, lisp was implemented _on_ the IBM machine while the design of the 6/10 architecture was influenced by the needs of lisp. Both Marvin and Gordon independently confirmed this to me.