Huh? There were early Lisps with free source, too.

Also, 1, I am not a GC basher. 2. I was wondering why Lisp didn't take over most of the world 15+ years ago. Overhead was more expensive then. (And small embedded systems will always have too little RAM.)

Overhead was more expensive and there was a cheaper alternative called UNIX.

I wonder how ir would have turned out if it wasn't available.

Uh... did I miss something? You don't need a lisp machine or a PDP-10 to run a lisp variant?

(Do you argue that it was too late when sh had scripting? The sh is gone now, bash will probably be replaced too.)

Scripting via the UNIX shell is a poor man's REPL.

Personally I don't remember the last time I used it for anything other than setting environment variables, for anything else there are better actual programming languages.

I never argued anything positive about shell programming. Ever. :-)

I still don't get your point, but assume you are saying that Unix is a poor replacement for a real lisp machine environment?

No, I am saying that if UNIX was available at the same price as the other OS of the time, it would never have been as successful as it was.

In general, UNIX is a poor replacement for any of the OSes designed at Xerox PARC, they did at least three remarkable ones.

Or at ETHZ for that matter.

Uhm, I still don't get why the development (/execution) environment would have been different for Lisp?

I am aware of that Unix/Linux is/was quite a simple solution. It is designed to be. It was still (more or less) the basis for Next and the present MacOS. Quite nice.

(Disclaimer: Today I really only use Linux computers, for apt and compatibility with servers. No MacOS flames, please. :-) )

> Uhm, I still don't get why the development (/execution) environment would have been different for Lisp?

I still don't get why you keep focusing this discussion on Lisp alone, I explicitly referred to several OSes.

All of them more expensive to buy than UNIX, which was available for peanuts.

As for OS X.

UNIX was the base for NeXTSTEP, because NeXT was after the workstation market owned by Sun and SGI workstations.

But anyone that has bothered to learn the NeXTSTEP stack and respective APIs, knows how little UNIX culture it had, beyond "bring your stuff to our platform".

The hybrid Mach/BSD kernel, device drivers written in Objective-C and the whole user space frameworks and GUI workflows.

Mac OS X follows that tradition as any developer committed to OS X technology stack knows.

Drivers are written in a C++ subset, we have the frameworks, automation via Apple Script, Objective-C and now Swift for GUI applications.

It thought UNIX originally belonged to AT&T and they sold licenses. See the UNIX history.

They were prevented to sell them in the beginning, which was when some of the AT&T guys brought the code into universities like Berkeley and Stanford.

EDIT: Well, they actually did sold licenses, but I guess $99 even in 70's was quite cheap vs what the alternatives were asking for

http://engineering2.berkeley.edu/labnotes/history_unix.html

"This led to requests for the system, but under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System (the parent organization of Bell Labs) was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request.[6] Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping."

-- Wikipedia

cheap, but not 'free'.

See also the later fate of UNIX (-> Novell, ...).