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hermes-brain/ideas/comparison-with-symbolics.org
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2026-05-23 06:09:08 +00:00

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Comparison with Symbolics Genera

Symbolics Genera (1980s) Passepartout (2020s)
Lines ~1,000,000 ~21,000 (self-driving target)
Developer-years ~10 years, large team ~1 year, 1-3 devs
OS Built from scratch in assembly + Lisp Runs on Linux (free OS layer)
Hardware Custom Lisp Machine (entire computer) PCIe card (FPGA or Tenstorrent)
Market $50K-$100K/seat $5K-$50K/appliance
Scope Full OS + environment Cognitive agent + hardware acceleration

The Symbolics comparison is instructive: they built a full Lisp OS from scratch. Passepartout runs on Linux, providing the OS layer for free. The hardware integration is a PCIe card, not a replacement of the entire host. The scope is dramatically smaller — ~2% of the code for a fraction of the functionality that matters most. This illustrates the fundamental principles of Lisp economics — the cost of building a Lisp-based system has dropped by orders of magnitude since the 1980s. The Self-driving Lisp Machine is the modern analogue: a hardware accelerator rather than a complete computer.