Why Symbolics died
There are many reasons why Symbolics, who employed perhaps one of the greatest collections of minds ever, died. This is one of them. What did $185K buy you, before discount? 8MW RAM, and a pretty loaded box. But just one of them.
Ouch. Don’t drop that on your foot either. The big 3600 series were the size of a refrigerator. Maybe you were paying by the pound? I do miss my 3620, which was a small “tower” that was a manageable size. Unfortunately, it didn’t survive the move from TX to VA.
This entry was posted at 1:21 pm on 18 July 2005 and is filed under Lisp, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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“Exorbitant price” isn’t a good reason for the failure; that sort of pricing was not atypical for high end workstations of the day. SGI hardware with similar specifications would have cost similar amounts. (Of course, SGI isn’t doing too well today…)
The real problem was that it was difficult for this kind of design to adapt to the cheap “Pee Cee” hardware that emerged. That is, performance of this sort of (highly customized) hardware couldn’t keep pace with the performance increases that came from Intel spending Billion$ on IA-32 development.
SGI tried to “dance” into the PC market; their unsuccessful leap into trying to hawk NT servers showed a pretty big misstep.
Symbolics had tied their future to Digital as Genera was ported to run atop Alpha/OSF/1; it could not have been evident at the time that this was a mistake, but what with HP now porting VMS to Itanium, it is clear now :-(.