Re: is it sensible to think of an extended address Lisp for the DEC-20?

[HEDRICK at RUTGERS]

We are trying to do a bit of long term system planning here.  One thing
that seems fairly obvious to us is that almost everybody who is doing
Lisp development work is using dedicated ("personal") processors of one
sort or another.  We can understand this at Xerox-Parc, where they can
afford to put the equivalent of 168 in everybody's office.  But it seems
to us that at more "normal" places a mixed strategy may be more
appropriate, with this sort of high-performance personal computer
being used only for groups with very heavy usage.  If this makes sense,
it seems that we should be concerned with keeping Lisp for PDP-10
class machines viable.  In this context, an obvious project would be
to produce a version of Lisp that takes advantage of the DEC-20's
extended address space.  However it seems to us that this is not being
done by any of the people we would normally expect to do it.  What we
are curious about is whether this is because there is some good reason
why the project doesn't make sense, or just because everyone is so
busy with shiny new toys (I don't intend this disparagingly) that no
one has had time to worry about our old workhorse?