This was a very interesting post. I think your analysis of the failure of Symbolics is the closest to being correct; that is, it is largely consistent with my view.

Something about me… I was working in computer vision at an industrial research lab when I was hired in February 1982 by the marketing organization of Symbolics. I was employee #32. I came to Symbolics because I’d have access to a lisp machine (“who could pass up that opportunity”) and I expected to get rich while there. To me, getting rich was that after 3 years I could walk away with $300,000, which was enough to buy a decent house in a nice neighborhood in LA. I left in November 1982 to do research in knowledge-based systems and programming environments at Xerox and ISI afterwards, where I still got to use lisp machines (Xerox then Symbolics). So why did I leave Symbolics after 10 months? I left because it was obvious to me that I would not get rich at Symbolics. I expected Symbolics to go belly-up after 5 years. Instead, it took 10 years simply because the software environment was so good – still better than what you can get today. How sad.

So what did I see that caused me to leave?

(1) About a month after I began working at Symbolics I went to a conference to help market Symbolics machines. The night before, I went to a large hotel room to meet the “east coast” folks. (I was one of two technical guys on the west coast.) Just after entering the room with my supervisor, he and one of the “east coast” guys started yelling at each other. The mere sight of seeing each other caused this display. And before and after this I witnessed what I considered to be excessive email flames that were distributed to all employees of the entire company. So I asked myself how can a company function (and succeed) with these kinds of problems? Good management would have had talked to these people and said something like “no matter how valuable you are to the success of this company, you are not so valuable that we can tolerate this behavior.” That was never done. BAD MANAGEMENT!

(2) The company was clearly run by the researchers, who were not profit driven. This allowed all kinds of things to happen. For example, Symbolics produced a laser printer based on a Canon print engine. Why? How could we possibly compete with Canon, Xerox, and others when our printer was essentially the same as their printers? Similarly, we delivered LM-2s without the instruction pre-fetch unit, which was supposed to make the machine run 50% faster. This was because the person that was assigned to do this was busy building 16-bit digital-to-analog converters when only 8-bit digital-to-analog converters were available. (At least this is what I was told.) This was done so that Symbolics could embed high-quality sound within its keyboard. How many machines would this feature sell? If we were lucky, maybe this feature caused the sale of 3 machines. Again, BAD MANAGEMENT that was not MARKET-DRIVEN.

(3) The machine was marketed as a Lisp machine. However, it was more than that. As you mentioned it supported C, Fortran, and Ada. When I was attached to marketing I can’t tell you how often I said we should be marketing to those communities too. There were a lot more C programmers than Lisp programmers. For whatever reason, all this great technology for non-Lispers was hidden. Again, BAD MARKETING. Also, what you did not mention was that Symbolics had built a VLSI design tool that they used to design the 3600 chips. Why wasn’t this sold? It should have been. Again, BAD MARKETING — there was a big and growing need for tools like this (and the mney was available for expensive VLSI design stations).

(4) When I was on the front line, trying to sell Lispms, we had a major problem. I’d try to sell Lispms to friends and former associates that cost a minimum of $90K, and generally $105K out-the-door. They were typically given $120K to buy computers. This left them with a choice of purchasing 1 Symbolics machine or 3 Xerox Dolphins. They generally selected the 3 Dolphins. Our cost for the keyboard was $3,200 and our cost for the monitor screen was $8K (at least that was what I was told). My recollection was that the manufacturing cost of a Symbolics machine was over $40K. Hence, about one-third of the cost of a machine was the keyboard, mouse, and display. I told people within Symbolics to consider using a dumb display as the front-end (something like a Datapoint terminal). I can remember one employee telling me something like “if people can’t appreciate why the machine is the way it is then they’re stupid.” Unfortunately, the potential buyers desired (drooled) to have them but few could afford them. Again, BAD MARKETING that didn’t align the products that Symbolics made with those of what the market would bare.

(5) Like I said earlier, the researchers led the company, and it was obvious that a problem we’d be facing in 2-3 years was the impending explosion in Intel-based PCs. In 1980, I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for about $1K than ran Emacs and Lisp (written by Jonathan Allen) incredibly fast, although without a fancy GUI. Again, BAD MANAGEMENT/MARKETING.

In sum, Symbolics developed incredible technology in 1982 (and a lot more thereafter) that is still better than what is available today. It failed because marketing did not identify the products that we should be building and selling (i.e., market-driven requirements) and management did not direct its personnel to build those products. If the problems that I mentioned are obvious to me – who was a reasonably smart tech weenie that wanted to make a few bucks it should have been obvious to marketing and management folks. (It should be noted that the Symbolics sales representative for Northern California left Symbolics to become VP of Marketing for Sun Microsystems in the summer of 1982, after about a half year of employment at Symbolics. So I assume he saw the handwriting on the wall too.) I wonder what would have happened if Sun’s management had been run Symbolics. I expect something much different.

I came to Symbolics in the beginning of 1986 and worked in the International Sales in Cambridge (and in Concord some time).

The International Dept. was not in the main stream, perhaps it should have been. Thus, I do not know everything what went on in the Engineering.

One thing was for sure, money was spent in lavish sales meetings, etc.
I was fortunate to qualify to the Australian Sales Award trip and that was tops. My wife was eternally grateful, but I could have been motivated with spending less money.

Summa summarum, I really enjoyed my time at Symbolics and enjoy finding Symbolians now in social networks.

all the best,

It’s not just being sold and maintained, but actively developed. HP/Intel included lockstep instructions in Itanium, and Tandem products are getting ported there.

(For a little while HP adopted the “Nonstop” name for all their business-critical servers, which is why my book on web servers for OpenVMS refers to “the non-stop webserver” in the title. They seem to have dropped that. But in any case, in the big redo that went with the Compaq acquisition, they decided that in the data-center range, OpenVMS, HP/UX, Linux, and NonStopOS (Tandem) were strategic, and that MPE, Precision Architecture, Tru64, and Alpha, weren’t, and started working to get everything strategic onto Itanium as well as to make Itanium acceptably functional.)

Atari did develop special hardware, but that’s how their field went: the Sony Playstation and Microsoft X-box and such are just as much special hardware and purpose-built devices.

I notice a lack in the mention of the Graphics division. That would have taken away some of the argument of a lack of focus on non-research products. The Graphics product line was definitely a deliverable to a non-researchy, very practically-oriented market.

Also, note that the Sunstone project did address many of the competitive concerns, especially the continual mention of Sun in this analysis. The Sunstone project included a chip design for a platform meant to run Unix and C, as well as Lisp. It was a safe C exploiting the tagged architecture, for example, to allow checking of array bounds. And the Sunstone project was being produced on-time. But to back up the analysis of Symbolics’ priorities, it was cancelled as we were getting the first chips back from LSI Logic.

An interesting historical note, I took my first ASIC class with the first Sun chip designers, at the time when Sun was just as small. That was the class that helped us produce the G machine chip set. In fact, because of our software expertise, we had an edge at the time in producing ASIC hardware faster than our competitors.

Internally, we continually found ways like this efficient ASIC design process, that showed how the Lisp machine could be used to produce practical, market-demanded products.

I actually don’t think lack of a single goal was as much of a problem as matching efforts in creating products to what was needed in the market place. Under the appropriate manager, most of the goals suggested as separate at the top of the list in this paper could be organized as a coherent, yet diversified, approach to address the value added by our technology. That technology was fueled initially by a Lisp machine, but it meant so much more than just a machine or even the Lisp language.