Re: Best LISPM/WorkStation?

["Christoph M. Hoffmann" <cmh@purdue.edu>]

We used the 1180 and 1186 Xerox dandilions at Cornell for a year or so
in our research on solid modeling.  We wern't too thrilled about them,
because of the poor floating point handling and because they were very
hard to learn.  The trouble with floating point was software related:
The compiler boxed everything, so it made a lot of work for the garbage
collector.  Also the fp precision turned out troublesome.  The net effect
was that we couldn't work with surfaces of (algebraic) degree 4 or higher,
which excluded for example the torus.  Here at Purdue we now use Symbolics
machines, and so does Cornell.