Anybody using CLOE (was: LISP on PCs) (completely lost)

[p2@porter.asl.dialnet.symbolics.com (Peter Paine)]

    Date: Wed, 9 Jan 91 17:47 EST
    From: miller@GEM.cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller)

	Date: Wed, 9 Jan 91 17:22-0000
	From: p2@porter.asl.dialnet.symbolics.com (Peter Paine)

	Stefan, given your arm's length evaluation of Lispm performance, here's
	a halfpenth worth:

		  Performance
		       |
	Seatbelt needed|        XL3600-Comflagration
		       |
	Makes one grin |        XL1200-FrameThrower
	    ...

    Inquiring minds just gotta know!

       What's an XL3600?

    Any rumors I've missed?
    Or maybe I overlooked an implicit ":>" ?

Sorry. Waffling about performance always feels like license to float
free in dreamland. I thought that the ":>" might infer that such a thing
could actually happen.

The XL3600 is otherwise known as the CDDR.

The cpu is driven by 3 Ivory Mk.4 chips which represent the first
significant move into lisp processor parallelism.

The basic box is about 1/2 the volume of the current XLs (much
extraneous sheet metal having been eliminated. The purchase guarantee is
for all hardware except disks for the same product life of the original
3600 - 10 years.

The basic unit comes with a pair of Gigabyte ESDI drives which also
operate in parallel being treated as one fep unit. A further 255
external disk pairs or other storage devices can be added. Software
configurable i/o interface and allows any SMD, ESDI, SCSI or analogue
device to be mounted dynamically.

The standard monitor is 40 bit color stereo HDTV but options include
wallcover flat screens and multi-hologram projection. The wireless mouse
has 3D spatial, sound and pressure detectors. Multiple mouse or glove
input is supported to aid conferencing and multiuser use.

The software comes bundled with all software languages except those used
by the banking community. The cross compilers are the first to fully
conform to emerging ARPA and ANSI standards guaranteeing that high level
code prototyped in Lisp will meet standards for execution in all current
microprocessors.

The FPA option is a 125 Transputer hypercube coprocessor which can also
be used to run concurrent Lisp through shared memory.

The $4B investment by Lippon Conglomerates had one prerequisite - that
Lippon 4 Mbyte piggyback chip be used in volume in an attempt to reduce
chip mountains. The standard XL3600 has 200 MWords and consequently the
parallel garbage collector is unused in all but the largest applications.

The monitor has both a Sparc 2 and 586 chipset for use in maintaining
backward compatibility with old conventional systems.

The collaborative agreement forged at Apple by Moon has brought a new 3D
GUI to the Lisp development environment.

TeraCard access to the Reuters global dynamic information is bundled, as
is a neural pattern matching utility which automatically learns to tailor
the environment to individual working styles.

Sales are through Tandy stores where the system is priced to fit well
with games hardware. 

After initial volume shipments into the educational sector, initial
market reaction mutters something about "... meant to fly, we'd have
been born with wings ...", "Customers prefer to stick with keyboard
layouts that they know", "As it does everything, we can't think what one
could use it for".

... what was that stuff about disclaimers.