So many mysteries: which customers, and which customers with the capacity to pay not only for an ongoing service contract but a port? Some unknown wealthy benefactor? Someone managing 30 year-old ICBMs?
There were some financial giants that used Symbolics for fraud detection; possibly it just makes sense to keep it running than to rewrite it. I remember American Express being a large customer, from what I read.
From what I recall of various discussions over time:
Around 2001, AMEX fraud detection system was still developed on Genera, then OpenGenera running on Alpha workstations, but for deployment it was compiled using Franz's Allegro Common Lisp to run on "normal" servers.
About 2014-2015? I remember seeing more than 100k USD in publicly visible support contracts for US federal agencies related to Symbolics systems, which might have been related to the part stock and repairs done by symbolics remnant mentioned in the article - I know for certain that repair work continued to happen until at least 2018 (I talked with one of the people doing the repairs on contract).
There does seem to be a small residual market, enough to support a little pro work. "Who" and "where" might be confidential, but "how big" and "why" or "what" could be fascinating.
