I came across this fascinating article from LispODROID, Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine - Reflections on the Developer Productivity, about an actual computer where the systems software and applications are coded in Lisp, with the machine's primary use case appearing to be coding more things in Lisp.

Here's a picture of one model of the Symbolics Lisp Machine, which the article says was sold between 1981 and 1993:

Being somewhat fascinated by Lisps (including Scheme) and Clojure), I was interested.

A look at the Wikipedia page for Symbolics told me that while the company was headquartered in Cambridge and later Concord, Massachusetts, it made the Symbolics Lisp Machine in the San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth, long known as a home to warehouses and manufacturing facilities. (Also pornography. But that's pretty much the whole Valley then and now, but especially then.) The Chatsworth facility closed in July 2005.

In the beginning, Symbolics Lisp Machines cost $70,000. Each. In 1980s money.

Among the other tidbits: Symbolics.com is the first-ever registered .com domain. (It might be the first domain name of any kind ever registered, but that seems like a harder claim to prove.)

Symbolics was born at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a desire to keep the Lisp code away from another MIT-launched company, Lisp Machines Inc., led MIT's Richard Stallman to create the free software movement.

I guess more than anything I'm fascinated by computer systems that really went their own way in terms of conception, design and philosophy. You can code in Lisp today on pretty much any computer, but a Lisp Machine? That's something you don't here about today in our Unix/Windows/nothing-else world.

Some other links:

• Probably the best place to start is Lisp Information and Resources. This page is deep with links.
• Lisp Lore: A Guide to Programming the Lisp Machine by Hank Bromley (via archive.org)
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel
• Basic Lisp Techniques by David J. Cooper
• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky
• Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum
• My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs by Richard Stallman
• Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI by Dan Weinreb

I reserve the right to add to this article.