Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!xanth!lll-winken!arisia!fischer
From: fischer@arisia.Xerox.COM (Ronald A. Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Faster Symbolics available now
Summary: other examples
Message-ID: <741@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Date: 15 May 89 20:41:20 GMT
References: <30569@sri-unix.SRI.COM>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Xerox PARC
Lines: 28

I heartily agree with Lou Steinberg of Rutgers on the issue of a small
company like Symbolics playing hardware catchup against Intel,
Motorola or the SPARC alliance.

> {proprietary hw or sw}

Xerox tried the low cost variant on this strategy with their 1108,
1109 and finally the 1186 Lisp worksations.  Their price to
performance ratio (at introduction) was excellent.  The software was
ported to the SUN atop a bytecode emulator and started selling better
than ever before.

LMI are out of business, after focussing on the commercial sector a
bit more than Symbolics.  The approach was similar, specialized
hardware and sell the advantage of a rich authoring environment.

TI was almost giving its Explorer boards away.  After losses for two
years they've downsized their group significantly.

There was that little startup down in LA.  I think they got as far as
printing glossy brochures...

Others?

With all of the failures surrounding this sort of strategy it is
suprizing to see no change of direction for Symbolics.

(ron)