1990 was already 10 years after the first machines had some wider availability. 'Wider availability' means more then 20 hand-made machines and having commercial vendors (LMI and Symbolics, then TI and Xerox). Yeah, Lucid was pretty nice - too bad then went under when their investment into C++ killed them.
Actually I think Lucid was founded, because Symbolics did not want to further invest into a UNIX based implementation.
Symbolics did support SUNs with Lisp Machine boards (the UX400 and UX1200). TI had Lisp Machines with UNIX boards.
Later Symbolics developed a virtual Lisp Machine running Open Genera (a version of their Genera operating system) for the 64bit DEC Alpha chip on top of UNIX.
"The Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine Or Using The Dec Alpha As A Programmable Micro-engine"
Lucid was founded because Symbolics was unbelievably expensive and unbelievably arrogant. “We will always be the best so you have no choice but to pay our prices, nobody can match our performance or technology.”
They wouldn’t even let a company decommissioning a workstation give it to an employee who wanted to take it home without paying about the cost of a Macintosh in “license transfer fees” and then whoever got it had to pay “maintenance” to stay within the letter of the license.
VLM is decent but they’d have been better off retargeting 80386 and 80486 atop either Unix or Windows, rather than trying to maintain their own special fancy architecture forever.
Also, once the Symbolics 3600 series was released in the early 1980s, Symbolics looked like they were just resting on their laurels relative to the rest of the industry. There weren’t binary-compatible performance improvements every year or two like the rest of the workstation industry was seeing, it took the rest of the decade to achieve that kind of improvement, and with only source compatibility, in the form of the XL series.
To do a bit of an apples to apples comparison, look at the Apollo and Sun workstation lines versus the Symbolics workstation line from 1983/4-1991/2. That takes you from the Apollo DN300, SUN-1, and Symbolics 3600, through the Apollo DN10000, Sun SPARCstation 2, and Symbolics XL1200. They all started at about 1 MIPS but ended at very different positions.
Actually I think Lucid was founded, because Symbolics did not want to further invest into a UNIX based implementation. Symbolics did support SUNs with Lisp Machine boards (the UX400 and UX1200). TI had Lisp Machines with UNIX boards.
Later Symbolics developed a virtual Lisp Machine running Open Genera (a version of their Genera operating system) for the 64bit DEC Alpha chip on top of UNIX.
"The Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine Or Using The Dec Alpha As A Programmable Micro-engine"
http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html