Architecture of the Symbolics 3600

The Symbolics 3600 is a family of high-performance, single user computers optimized for the Lisp language and for interactive use. This paper briefly discusses some of the interesting aspects of the architecture, including the representation of data, the instruction set used for compiled code, the function calling discipline, and the way exception traps and interrupts are handled. The reader is assumed to have some previous exposure to the basic concepts of Lisp (4).