Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--01c883-The Lisp machine was able to e/en

The Lisp machine was able to execute instructions about as fast as those other machines, but each instruction &mdash; a car instruction would do data typechecking &mdash; so when you tried to get the car of a number in a compiled program, it would give you an immediate error. We built the machine and had a Lisp operating system for it. It was written almost entirely in Lisp, the only exceptions being parts written in the microcode. People became interested in manufacturing them, which meant they should start a company.