Possible. I just saw Steel Jr and Sussman's names. Then implied a LISP machine could be made with 1 person if it could be made with 2. Just take more time. So, if not that one, than any that was only done with 2 people.
Errr, to my knowledge, neither of them made major contributions to the Lisp Machine, outside of perhaps ideas.
It sounds like you're referring to their Scheme chip project, which they did not have the resources to push to success, e.g. getting the microcode right in one or two tries (the computing resources to simulate it were not available).
The Lisp Machine proper was a project done with TTL and fathered by Richard Greenblatt, who probably did some hardware design and more likely microcode work, as well as system software as I recall. However the principle hardware designer was Tom Knight, David Moon wrote a lot of microcode (the Lisp Machine's microcode did a lot, e.g. eval, GC, the bytecode interpreter), he and Dan Weinreb are the only authors listed on the cover of the 1981 4th edition of the manual, Weinreb wrote the first text editor for it, the per Wikipedia and my faint memory the 2nd EMACS implementation, and the first with a GUI and done in Lisp. Howard Cannon developed the Flavors OO extension, with which I remember a lot of the GUI was implemented.
It was a pretty big project; hmmm, TempleOS is the only "comprehensive" OS I can think of that was done by one or two people.
Yeah, it was the Scheme chip I was talking about. I guessed that they were included in the banner of LISP machines because Scheme is a LISP. So, they never actually built it? That's disappointing.
No, they built it, but the microcode had enough bugs it wasn't viable as more than a proof of concept, and it was also a part of the brand new and very exciting Mead & Conway revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution).
After that the MIT Scheme community concentrated on producing a good version of the language for the 68000, which of course developed an ecosystem a homegrown chip could never hope to achieve back then. This was to support Sussman's work, including SICP/6.001 (Steele went to CMU "to bring the light to the heathen" :-).
Ah, thanks for the Mead & Conway revolution link. That fills a gap in the hardware and EDA research I've been doing: the how of the transition from discrete to custom chips. So, they practically invented VLSI methodology and MOSIS service? That's pretty awesome.
Back to Scheme. Ok, so they built it but it was a buggy, throw-away, proof-of-concept. I'll try to remember that in future references. Then they transitioned to software and SICP. Ok, a working Scheme chip would've been neat for me but I concede they made the right call for the time. Plus, it's better to work out a concept and how it will be used before trying to put it into silicon. Lets you decide which parts are really worth putting in hardware.
"Steele went to CMU "to bring the light to the heathen"
Haha. That's funny. Guess that's my job now. Appreciate your clarifications on the Scheme chip and its context.
