Symbolics, Inc. is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.Symbolics, Sales by David Schmidt
The symbolics.com domain was originally registered on 15 March 1985, making it the first .com-domain in the world. In August 2009, it was sold to a domain name investment company.
History
Symbolics, Inc. was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Concord, Massachusetts, with manufacturing facilities in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. Robert P. Adams (an MIT graduate) was Symbolics’ first President and co-founder along with Russell Noftsker, and in fact, the name “Symbolics” was coined by Robert Adams while the company was initially being formed in his home in Santa Monica, California. Its first CEO, chairman, and co-founder was Russell Noftsker.Noftsker took over as President one year after incorporation. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the programming language Lisp. Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera for Tru64 UNIX on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Alpha.
Symbolics was a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab, one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines. The other was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.
Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2, introduced in 1981, was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design. The operating system and software development environment, over 500,000 lines, was written in Lisp from the microcode up, based on MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp.
The software bundle was later renamed ZetaLisp, to distinguish the Symbolics' product from other vendors who had also licensed the MIT software. Symbolics' Zmacs text editor, a variant of Emacs, was implemented in a text-processing package named ZWEI, an acronym for Zwei was Eine initially, with Eine being an acronym for Eine Is Not Emacs. Both are recursive acronyms and puns on the German words for one (eins, eine) and two (zwei).
The Lisp Machine system software was then copyrighted by MIT, and was licensed to both Symbolics and LMI. Until 1981, Symbolics shared all its copyrighted enhancements to the source code with MIT and kept it on an MIT server. According to Richard Stallman, Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all Symbolics' copyrighted fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to Symbolics (and MIT but not to Symbolics competitors), and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment.
Symbolics felt that it no longer had sufficient control over its product. At that point, Symbolics began using its own copy of the software, located on its company servers, while Stallman says that Symbolics did that to prevent its Lisp improvements from flowing to Lisp Machines, Inc. From that base, Symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software, and continued to deliver almost all the source code to its customers (including MIT). However, the policy prohibited MIT staff from distributing the Symbolics version of the software to others. With the end of open collaboration came the end of the MIT hacker community. As a reaction to this, Stallman initiated the GNU project to make a new community. Eventually, Copyleft and the GNU General Public License would ensure that a hacker's software could remain free software. In this way, Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating the free software movement.
+ CADR machines Model Year Description LM-2 1981 Workstation based on MIT CADR architecture
The 3600 series
In 1983, a year later than planned, Symbolics introduced the 3600 family of Lisp machines. Code-named the "L-machine" internally, the 3600 family was an innovative new design, inspired by the CADR architecture but sharing few of its implementation details. The main processor had a 36-bit word (divided up as 4 or 8 bits of tags, and 32 bits of data or 28 bits of memory address). Memory words were 44 bits, the additional 8 bits being used for error-correcting code (ECC). The instruction set was that of a stack machine. The 3600 architecture provided 4,096 hardware registers, of which half were used as a cache for the top of the control stack; the rest were used by the microcode and time-critical routines of the operating system and Lisp run-time environment. Hardware support was provided for virtual memory, which was common for machines in its class, and for garbage collection, which was unique.
The original 3600 processor was a microprogrammed design like the CADR, and was built on several large circuit boards from standard TTL integrated circuits, both features being common for commercial computers in its class at the time. Central processing unit (CPU) clock speed varied depending on which instruction was being executed, but was typically around 5 MHz. Many Lisp primitives could be executed in a single clock cycle. Disk input/output (I/O) was handled by multitasking inside of the microcode level. A 68000 processor (termed the front-end processor, (FEP)) started the main computer up, and handled the slower peripherals during normal operation. An Ethernet interface was standard equipment, replacing the Chaosnet interface of the LM-2.
The 3600 was roughly the size of a household refrigerator. This was partly due to the size of the processor (the cards were widely spaced to allow wire-wrap prototype cards to fit without interference) and partly due to the size of disk drive technology in the early 1980s. At the 3600's introduction, the smallest disk that could support the ZetaLisp software was wide (most 3600s shipped with the 10½-inch Fujitsu Eagle). The 3670 and 3675 were slightly shorter in height, but were essentially the same machine packed a little tighter. The advent of , and later , disk drives that could hold hundreds of megabytes led to the introduction of the 3640 and 3645, which were roughly the size of a two-drawer file cabinet.
Later versions of the 3600 architecture were implemented on custom integrated circuits, reducing the five cards of the original processor design to two, at a large manufacturing cost savings and with performance slightly better than the old design. The 3650, first of the G machines, as they were known within the company, was housed in a cabinet derived from the 3640s. Denser memory and smaller disk drives enabled the introduction of the 3620, about the size of a modern full-size tower PC. The 3630 was a fat 3620 with room for more memory and video interface cards. The 3610 was a lower priced variant of the 3620, essentially identical in every way except that it was licensed for application deployment rather than general development.
+ 36xx machines Model Year Description 3600 1983 Workstation 3670 1984 Workstation 3640 1984 Workstation 3675 1985 Workstation 3645 1985 Workstation 3610 1986 Workstation 3620 1986 Workstation 3650 1986 Workstation
The various models of the 3600 family were popular for artificial intelligence (AI) research and commercial applications throughout the 1980s. The AI commercialization boom of the 1980s led directly to Symbolics' success during the decade. Symbolics computers were widely believed to be the best platform available for developing AI software. The LM-2 used a Symbolics-branded version of the complex space-cadet keyboard, while later models used a simplified version (at right), known simply as the . The Symbolics keyboard featured the many modifier keys used in Zmacs, notably Control/Meta/Super/Hyper in a block, but did not feature the complex symbol set of the space-cadet keyboard.
Also contributing to the 3600 series' success was a line of bit-mapped graphics color video interfaces, combined with extremely powerful animation software. Symbolics' Graphics Division, headquartered in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, near to the major Hollywood movie and television studios, made its S-Render and S-Paint software into industry leaders in the animation business and its 24 fps lock displays were featured in Star Trek movies.Kalman Reti : History of Symbolics Lisp machines (including a demo of Brad Parker's emulator port) – The Last Symbolics Developer, at MIT at a meeting of the Boston Lisp group, 28 June 2012 @ YouTube
Symbolics developed the first workstations able to process high-definition television (HDTV) quality video, which enjoyed a popular following in Japan. A 3600, with the standard black-and-white monitor, made a cameo appearance in the movie Real Genius. The company was also referenced in Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park.
Symbolics' Graphics Division was sold to Nichimen Trading Company in the early 1990s, and the S-Graphics software suite (S-Paint, S-Geometry, S-Dynamics, S-Render) ported to Franz Allegro Common Lisp on Silicon Graphics (SGI) and PC computers running Windows NT. Today it is sold as Mirai by Izware LLC, and continues to be used in major motion pictures (most famously in New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings), video games, and military simulations.
Symbolics' 3600-series computers were also used as the first front end controller computers for the Connection Machine massively parallel computers manufactured by Thinking Machines Corporation, another MIT spinoff based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Connection Machine ran a parallel variant of Lisp and, initially, was used primarily by the AI community, so the Symbolics Lisp machine was a particularly good fit as a front-end machine.
For a long time, the operating system didn't have a name, but was finally named Genera around 1984. The system included several advanced dialects of Lisp. Its heritage was Maclisp on the PDP-10, but it included more data types, and multiple-inheritance object-oriented programming features. This Lisp dialect was called Lisp Machine Lisp at MIT. Symbolics used the name ZetaLisp. Symbolics later wrote new software in Symbolics Common Lisp, its version of the Common Lisp standard.
Ivory and Open Genera