Risc vs Symbolics (was: Poor Sun timings, as competition...)

[snicoud@atc.boeing.com (Stephen L. Nicoud)]

    Date: 14 Aug 90 00:25:53 GMT
    From: lgm@iexist.att.com

    MIPS can do this very easily today.  At one time Texas
    Instruments was expressing interest in adding functionality
    to the SPARC design to run Lisp better; perhaps, if they ever
    do this, they'll include support for incremental garbage
    collection.

I think it was Doug Johnson at TI who was working with the SPUR
(Symbolic Processing Using RISC) group at Berkeley.  SPUR sure
looked like a great way to go, but I guess I remember seeing
somewhere that the project withered away.  I'm not at all clear
as to why.  Rumor also has it that TI stopped all new Lisp
development on July 1 of this year.  Their next release, 6.1 is
supposed to be their final one (though TI will continue to
provide maintenance for an unspecified period of time). [Anybody
remember the 99/4A?]

Steve
--
Stephen L. Nicoud <snicoud@atc.boeing.com> uw-beaver!bcsaic!snicoud
Boeing Advanced Technology Center for Computer Sciences