There was the Lisp-machines, Symbolics etc. I was lucky to be able to work on one. Then they went out of favor because of cheaper hardware that could run anything.
But I wonder, what happened to the Lisp-machine software? Should it not be possible to run it on current day general purpose hardware even more snappily?
The short answer to what happened to Genera is that it's owned by a private holding company that bought up a bunch of Symbolics IP in the 1996 bankruptcy proceedings. They made one further release in 1998, and afaik haven't done any development on it since.
Presumably there's some price at which they'd be willing to either open-source it or sell it to someone who would put dev resources into it, but that hasn't happened.
But I wonder, what happened to the Lisp-machine software? Should it not be possible to run it on current day general purpose hardware even more snappily?