[bsder]

> There were articles for example in the Byte magazine.

And they were stupid. Even "good" Lisp references didn't cover the important things like hashes and arrays. Everybody covered the recursive crap over and over and over ad nauseam while people who actually used Lisp almost always sidestepped those parts of the language.

> I had a Lisp on an Apple II. It was a useless toy. I was using UCSD Pascal and Modula 2 on it. Much better.

And yet UCSD Pascal was using a P-machine. So, the problem was the implementation and not the concept. Which was exactly my point.

> At least there were people willing to pay for it.

Temporarily. But then it died when the big money went away and left Lisp all but dead. All the while all the people using languages on those "toys" kept right on going.

[lispm]

> And yet UCSD Pascal was using a P-machine. So, the problem was the implementation and not the concept. Which was exactly my point.

My point is that implementations don't come from nothing. You can't just demand them to be there. They have to be invented/implemented/improved/... Companies at that time did not invest any money in micro implementations of Lisp. I also believe that there was a reason for that: it would have been mostly useless.

> Temporarily. But then it died when the big money went away and left Lisp all but dead. All the while all the people using languages on those "toys" kept right on going.

Lot's of toys and languages for them died.