I'm sure a bit of web searching will turn up more. It looks like having special purpose hardware for Prolog is useful, which I don't find too surprising. But if you make hardware, you need someone to give you money for it.
As an aside, I wonder now much of the use of Lisp machines was non-academic. I know that there were actual commercial companies selling them, but where those mostly university spinoffs selling back to universities?
> As an aside, I wonder now much of the use of Lisp machines was non-academic. I know that there were actual commercial companies selling them, but where those mostly university spinoffs selling back to universities?
I would think that roughly 10000 hardware Lisp machines were built (incl. embedded boards). Quite a lot went into research, but not just academic research, but also company R&D.
Some machines were built as deployment machines and were used by military, government agencies (like NASA) and also commercial.
Notable were for example the graphics systems by Symbolics which were widely used in high-end graphics for TV and animation studios. A lot of computer animated logos you were seeing in TV in the mid/end 80s were done with them.
But there were a bunch of other early deployed applications on Lisp Machines: 3d cad (iCAD), American Express Authorizer (credit authorization expert system), scheduling for the Hubble Space Station, scheduling for power plant operations, seat allocation optimization for swissair, early military troop virtual reality training system, satellite image processing, ...
