Symbolics Macivory Quadra 650?

It's a system with a true LISP coprocessor on NuBus cards. Incidentally, it can use a NuVista video card which is what the Avid system uses.

http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html

It's a neat system, and I always loved Symbolics hardware. But that is a ridiculous asking price. They're not THAT rare (though I'd sure like to have one).

The "lisp co-processor" runs its own operating system called "Genera" which is dramatically different from windows/unix derivatives like osx and windows. The operating system is totally object-oriented in a way which even puts NextStep to shame. It's also got one of the best development environments ever made. A truly excellent machine from one of the last computer companies to make 'the whole computer' -- the processor, the operating system, the development tools, and the applications.

http://lispm.dyndns.org/genera-concepts/genera.html

It would be nice to have, but at what cost?

They really are quite rare. But this auction was asking too much. 500$-1k$ would be too much for me, but for a complete setup a more reasonable price to ask. Consider that once the user hosed their Genera partition that they would have no way to restore it, this would be an expensive gamble. I saw a MacIvory 3 system years ago go for about $500 and I balked that I'd surely find one cheaper... hasn't happened yet! Just my luck that I never have the money when a cool, rare dreamgadget becomes available.

The fastest Symbolic setup ever was OpenGenera, the system ported to a virtual machine run on DEC Alphas under Tru64 UNIX (aka Digital UNIX, aka OSF/1). And if you poke around, you may find that a few people have been quietly tweaking OpenGenera to run on modern 64-bit systems, such as Linux and MacOS. Personally, I am going to wait until I fix my Alpha to bother with it.

I can't believe the guy actually sold it for that much.