> The biggest was that they didn't use a microprocessor
The Symbolics Ivory microprocessor was introduced in 1988.
> Franz LISP on a Sun was comparable to using a Symbolics
Not really.
The Lisp alternatives to Symbolics came later with commercial systems like the TI Explorer and then Allegro CL, Lucid CL, LispWorks, Golden Common Lisp, Macintosh Common Lisp.
That was a culture thing. There were Big LISP people on PDP-10s and Little People using UNIX. Having used both, I found it easier to get things done in Franz LISP than in the rather overbuilt Common LISP systems of the era. Franz LISP was set up like a UNIX program - you edited text files in some editor, then ran the compiler and run time system. Common LISP systems of the era were one giant application you never left. This is also part of the source of the EMACS/vi split. Big LISP people used EMACS, and Little People used vi.
GUI based systems were a thing at least since Smalltalk 80.
Generally all kinds of IDEs were common on smallest machines. Lisp had nice IDEs on small machines like the early Macintosh Common Lisp which ran usefully in 4 MB RAM on a Mac SE.
> found it easier to get things done in Franz LISP than in the rather overbuilt Common LISP systems of the era
Many others thought different and GUI based Windows systems with IDEs won much of the market.
> I found it easier to get things done in Franz LISP than in the rather overbuilt Common LISP systems of the era.
Franz LISP was dead end, never made it to Windows as a product.
> Common LISP systems of the era were one giant application you never left.
Many of CL systems of that area (which appeared mid 80s) could be used like Franz LISP just with vi and a shell: CMUCL, KCL, Allegro CL, Lucid CL, LispWorks and many others.
Franz Inc. created Allegro CL, which ran bare bones on Unix with any editor&shell, with GNU Emacs (via ELI) or additionally with its own IDE tools. Eventually also ran on Microsoft Windows, including a GUI designer.
That was later. I was doing this around 1980-1981, when the LISP options were much fewer, the Mackintosh did not exist, Windows did not exist, and Symbolics machines were just becoming available. Franz Lisp was a good option. Common LISP came later, with many features from the Symbolics refrigerator, including their rather clunky object system.
Among other things, I ported the Boyer-Moore theorem prover to Franz Lisp. That started life on Interlisp on a PDP-10. I later ported it to Common LISP, and I have a currently working version today on Github, for nostalgia reasons. It's fun seeing it run 1000x faster than it did back then.
In 1980 Symbolics did not sell any machines. The company was not on the market at that time. The first handful of machines reached the market in late 1981 and they literally were the first of its kind. They were also mostly the same systems that MIT developed, sold as LM-2. Almost no GUI based machines of any kind were commercially (!) available at that time. Just about 80 (eighty) of those LM-2 were ever built and sold between 81 and 83. The first actual Symbolics machine reached the market in about 1983, the Symbolics 3600.
SUN did not sell anything in 1980/81. The SUN 1 came to the market in mid/late 1982 as a 68k machine with a SUN memory management unit.
Basically in 1980/1981 there were no UNIX system with a GUI on the market (i.e. commercially available) at all.
> including their rather clunky object system.
Common Lisp's object system was developed many years later. The first spec was published in 88.
Franz LISP used the same object system as Symbolics. It shipped with an object system called Flavors.
The Symbolics Ivory microprocessor was introduced in 1988.
> Franz LISP on a Sun was comparable to using a Symbolics
Not really.
The Lisp alternatives to Symbolics came later with commercial systems like the TI Explorer and then Allegro CL, Lucid CL, LispWorks, Golden Common Lisp, Macintosh Common Lisp.