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[not about] gc-by-area and host uptimes



    I agree with Jeff 100%.  If the XL-400 had come out at the same time
    as the Explorer-II, Symbolics would be in alot better shape now.  

I think you're being unfair to Symbolics on a couple of points.  One,
Symbolics has never had the luxury of money to burn, and two, they came
into the game with a lot less experience and far fewer resources than TI
has in putting designs into silicon.  Furthermore, they didn't simply
take an existing design and make a VLSI version of it like TI did.  They
have designed and produced the first genuine lisp-on-a-chip, not yet
another general-purpose processor microcoded for doing lisp.  I think
the performance curves will clearly show the benefits of this approach,
especially as Ivory-based products mature.  

I certainly won't claim that Symbolics has never made any mistakes,
but they do deserve a lot of credit for some pretty impressive
accomplishments.

	And
    given the increases in speeds of generic unix boxes, who will need an
    Ivory coprocessor?

Given the increases in speed of Symbolics lisp machines, who will 1want
0to have anything to do with generic unix boxes?   I'm sorry if my
prejudices are showing, but I don't believe that speed of hardware can
ever make up for deeply rooted problems with a software environment.