A major reason Symbolics machines died is that as early as 1987 they were being blown away by stock hardware.  At least on small programs -- they maintained a speed lead for years on what was then large stuff (200MB address spaces, with only say 16MB of RAM -- I do >>not<< think of those as "the good old days"!).
But (a) outrunning commodity hardware became impossible and (b) the software efforts were aimed at adding more features rather than improving performance and (c) I'm sure a host of other truely random factors killed them off.

Franz's ACLPC is the first environment that enabled me to stop missing Symbolics machines.  The debugger and compiler on the current version still aren't all I want, but I have high hopes for the next release.  We should do some of our own head-to-head Java/ACLPC comparisons on our apps once the new release is farther along and we get some breathing space...

At 08:57 AM 4/12/98 -0500, Arthur Flatau wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, 10 Apr 1998 22:57:58 -0500 (CDT), CoRey <omega.uta.edu at cjc9024> said:
>
>> I'm not worried about it too much, I'm waiting for my account on a
>> real Symbolics Lisp Machine with Genera to play with, and that will
>> blow away ANY Lisp I could get for Linux :=P it has CLOS now and
>> everything in CLTL2 I think...I plan on porting StarLisp simulator and
>> Maxima (the original Macsyma is on this machine too I believe).
>
>Ah a Symbolics Lisp Machine, those were the days.  A program
>development environment that was years ahead of its time.  I still
>believe in many ways it is superior to what exists today.
>
>I have not used a Symbolics in perhaps ten years, at least eight.  I
>did not think any still existed.  Has there been any development work
>on Symbolics in the last ten years?  It is hard to believe that a
>Symbolics (even if there has been some development in the last 10
>years) would "blow away" Lisp on any modern workstation.  I would be
>surprised if it could "blow away" Lisp on this HP-UX box which was a
>fairly fast box 3-4 years ago.
>
>Art
>
>-- 
>Arthur Flatau                           Texas Microprocessor Division
<amd.com at >Arthur.Flatau>                   Advanced Micro Devices
>                                        5900 East Ben White Boulevard
>                                        M/S 625 Austin TX 78741
>
>
>