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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

This is exceptionally cool, but even for someone like me who has disposable income, a deep love of retrocomputing and several years of Lisp experience... it's just very expensive. For the machine, GPIO headers and USB keyboard support (really the bare minimum for interesting things) its over $300.

You have to really, REALLY love offbeat baremetal lisp machines to throw down that kind of cache for a system where your USB controller is probably more robust and powerful than the entire rest of the system put together. Hell, I'm pretty sure my TV's remote control clocks faster when it's on...

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The price will come down, soon, as soon as I can build a batch of about 50. I'm thinking of creating a mass buy sign-up, so I can put in a big order and offer them at a reduced price. Or some sort of credit on future purchases for those who buy now. I'm open to suggestions, and ideas on what is an attractive/competitive target price.

info@makerlisp.com, any time you have a question or comment, I'm all ears :)

I appreciate that you're doing small batch SBCs and that adds up. As an artistic accomplishment, I love your work.

I think that for me personally, the outer envelope for a SBA (with the ability to use a USB keyboard and some sort of minimal display attachment) is $150.

The GPIO expansion and the cute case are fine as secondary things and I wouldn't mind giving over for that.

I don't know if there is some sort of uart option for serial comms on the board, I didn't see that called out. But if there is you perhaps want to mention it is your option for folks buying on a tighter budget.

Yes, there is a USB/UART on the CPU card, I think I do mention it, but not as directly as I should. Once you have the expansion board, then real terminals or computers with serial ports are possible too.

Thank you for the compliment :)

If you like the idea of a small lisp machine, you should look at uLisp. Last time I priced out the components they came to somewhere in the $20 to $40 range.

I must begrudgingly agree. I've spent less than that on entire actual retro computers that could emulate multiple of these in parallel.

I feel the same way. I've been watching this project for months. I really want to support it, but I don't think I'd get enough use out of it to justify the cost.

Compare to the price of a Symbolics Lisp Machine back when they were on the market.

No. That's ridiculous. To some extent I want the fun of the retro machine without the hassle or $30k price tags of the days of old that helped inculcate that reverence in me.

I can't help but compare this to the Nvidia Jetson I just bought that can run SBCL just fine, costs 1/3 as much for the entire feature kit sans laser cut Labo-style keyboard, and uh... I could actually do things with. I don't expect to get exactly the same value from a limited run retrocomputing platform, but I at least expect full transparency on the source before I buy, and an emulator so if I do make something I like and the board faults out I'm not SOL.

Having a computer with a much simpler (like several orders of magnitude simpler) software stack has its own appeal.

Though I wouldn't buy it either, since I have already more computers which can run Lisp than I have time to. Including a Nvidia Jetson Nano and actual Symbolics machines.

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