Of course we see some old friends in this animated infographic: 6502, 8080, and so on. You can see the unusually small chips arriving a bit late in the progression: ARM 1 is labelled Acorn 1 but otherwise I have no complaints. I see some machines I’d not heard of: TI’s Explorer LISP machine for example. (And who would have guessed a dual-core Itanium would have been unusually large? But that’s straying from retrocomputing…)
via one of slatestarcodex’ link dumps
The original Explorer Lisp machines did not have a dedicated CPU.
But they did, later, come out (internally) with a “Lisp machine on a chip”.
It was a big, 256 pin monster at the time. This was late-80’s…'88, '89.
It was presented to us at a defense contractor for potential use in some systems, including missiles. I recall saying “What, you’re going to blow it up!?” Such a marvel for the age.
Of course, this all got frozen out from the AI winter.
Correct, the MIT CONS and CADR machines were traditional minicomputers with their CPUs built with TTL chips. TI integrated this architecture into a single chip. But this happened to many minicomputers and even some mainframes.