Greenblatt believed the company could be "bootstrapped", i.e. financed practically from scratch from the order flow from customers (some of whom were willing to pay in advance).

Noftsker favored a more conventional venture capital model, raising a considerable sum of money, but with the investors having control of the company.

They went on to start Symbolics Inc. Alexander Jacobson, a consultant from CDC, was trying to put together an AI natural language computer application, came to Greenblatt, seeking a Lisp machine for his group to work with.

The following parable-like story is told about LMI by Steven Levy and used for the first time in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984).

Greenblatt insisted that the company remain true to the hacker spirit, in that it should bow to no one, and focus solely on the creation of a good product.

Others (including Bill Gosper and Tom Knight) felt that to be under the rule of Greenblatt was unacceptable.When Noftsker started Symbolics, while he was able to pay salaries, he didn't actually have a building or any equipment for the programmers to work on.

While both companies delivered proprietary software, Richard Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab.

"[2] He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a "crime", not the act of charging for a copy of the software.

Symbolics had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital.

The LAMBDA's processor cards were designed to work in a NuBus-based engineering workstation, the NuMachine, which had been originated by Steve Ward's group at MIT, and, through a separate chain of events, was being developed by Western Digital Corporation.

GigaMos, through the ownership of a Canadian backer named Guy Montpetit, bought the assets of LMI through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Montpetit subsequently became embroiled in a 1989 Canadian political scandal which, as a side-effect, resulted in the seizure of all the assets of GigaMos, rendering the company unable to meet payroll.