MIT never made Lisp Machines as a product. The ones made at MIT were hand-made for use only at MIT. (Well, there was a robotic wire-wrapping machine that did a lot of the work automatically, and there was another robot that would automatically test the connectivity of all the wires. IIRC, it would take a couple of weeks for the robotic connectivity tester just to test one backplane.)
Most of the people involved with designing the Lisp Machines ultimately left MIT, however, to start companies to manufacture and sell them. The most prominent of these was Symbolics. There was also LMI.
And yes, Lisp Machines were very expensive personal computers. But computers for "professionals" were generally pretty expensive at the time. A timesharing computer that could handle 20 or 30 users could easily cost $1 million.
How much did the mouse for a Lisp Machine cost? IIRC, around $250. Economies of scale, and all that.... Yes, Lisp Machines always had mice.
Btw, it was the founding of Symbolics and LMI that prompted Richard Stallman to become a free software radical. He stayed at MIT, and spent a lot of his time porting back to MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp the improvements made to it by Symbolics. This is why Stallman came up with the GPL. He was galled that Symbolics had hijacked MIT's open code and had made it proprietary.
Most of the people involved with designing the Lisp Machines ultimately left MIT, however, to start companies to manufacture and sell them. The most prominent of these was Symbolics. There was also LMI.
And yes, Lisp Machines were very expensive personal computers. But computers for "professionals" were generally pretty expensive at the time. A timesharing computer that could handle 20 or 30 users could easily cost $1 million.
How much did the mouse for a Lisp Machine cost? IIRC, around $250. Economies of scale, and all that.... Yes, Lisp Machines always had mice.
Btw, it was the founding of Symbolics and LMI that prompted Richard Stallman to become a free software radical. He stayed at MIT, and spent a lot of his time porting back to MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp the improvements made to it by Symbolics. This is why Stallman came up with the GPL. He was galled that Symbolics had hijacked MIT's open code and had made it proprietary.