Comments on: Why Did Symbolics Fail?

By: Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » More About Data Models

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » More About Data Models — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:27:49 +0000

[...] that, Symbolics refused to let us port Statice to other hardware. Meanwhile, the object-oriented database system [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:32:32 +0000

Whichever way you look at the facts, it makes for a nice reminiscence on one of the most innovative and exciting computing platforms of all time. It’s very interesting that talk of the DEC Alpha gets brought into it too.

Sometimes I think the reason we lose these platforms along with their plus points is that the market isn’t always smart enough to know what’s good for it.

The situation with are in today in I.T. is definitely not the culmination of the best of everything that came before it.

Some things are explained by the throw of chance.

By: Gavin Guerra

Gavin Guerra — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:25:27 +0000

I was very green 3D animator in the late 80′s early 90′s who got started with a Symbolics unified workstation, so I come at this from that perspective. It was WAY ahead of it’s time in many ways, but the UNIX boxes (SGI in particular) were kicking it’s butt on performance if not functionality. As an end user, I did not care if LISP was elegant, I wanted faster renders, and begged the developers for more speed.The industry was moving away from the “Black box” turn key systems and going toward platform independence…. Symbolics became a hardware vendor in a software world. I clung on as long as I could, and to this day STILL use some of the software that migrated to the PC… I remember very fondly the engineers from those days… some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever been associated with.

By: 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands | Technology

25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands | Technology — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:04:40 +0000

[...] the company started its slow descent towards bankruptcy and oblivion, neatly chronicled in this blog post by former Symbolics employee Dan Weinreb: The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new [...]

By: 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands | Anthonyrobinson.info

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:41:13 +0000

By: 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands

25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:10:07 +0000

[...] the company started its slow descent towards bankruptcy and oblivion, neatly chronicled in this blog post by a former employee: The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new “workstation” [...]

By: bgroves

bgroves — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:29:11 +0000

All I know is that I still enjoy writing my Genera programs on my XL1201s at work. I can develop just about any application I try faster and better than anyone else there.

By: dlweinreb

dlweinreb — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:32:04 +0000

JK: Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say above in the paragraph starting “The world changed out from under us…” and so on. Of course we knew all about Sun when they were emerging, but at the time we thought we nevertheless had a huge edge when it came to running Lisp, and that there would be a big demand for said premium.

By: JK

JK — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:27:46 +0000

Wait, wait, wait a second. I seem to remember a slightly different reason for Symbolics’ demise: they–along with a few other companies–were stomped in the marketplace by Sun. The mid-80′s were a time of fierce competition in the workstation market, and Sun was really good at bringing out hardware that was reasonably capable and remarkably cheap compared to their rivals.

Someone with a better memory please correct me, but I seem to remember that you could put together a nicely loaded Sun-2 (and later Sun-3) workstation for around $50K; that was pretty close to the starting price for a stripped-down 36XX series. You’d be looking at well over $100K for a Symbolics comparable to the Sun in terms of CPU speed, RAM, and disk space. (The Symbolics system did however include essentially the same hardware as a Sun-2 as a front-end for the Lisp engine.)

But the real trick wasn’t just comparing one box against another: for the same price as the Symbolics, you could buy one really loaded Sun (that could be used as a workstation-cum-server) plus a couple more stripped-down Sun workstations. And then you could network the Suns and have a complete environment for a small software development team–for the same price as one single-user Symbolics workstation. And if you added another coder to the team? You bought another $25K stripped-down Sun and hooked it up to the network. No such option with the Symbolics.

That’s the way I remember it. The company I worked for at the time did indeed buy a few Symbolics for a specific project, along with a few Apollos, etc., but mostly we–like many, many other companies–bought lots of Suns.

By: If it works…

If it works… — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:46:42 +0000

[...] above paper reference came from Dan Weinreb’s post Why Did Symbolics Fail? If you ever want to start a company, you can learn a lot from reading “war stories” like the [...]