Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2, introduced in 1981, was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design.

Code-named the "L-machine" internally, the 3600 family was an innovative new design, inspired by the CADR architecture but sharing few of its implementation details.

The 3600 architecture provided 4,096 hardware registers, of which half were used as a cache for the top of the control stack; the rest were used by the microcode and time-critical routines of the operating system and Lisp run-time environment.

Hardware support was provided for virtual memory, which was common for machines in its class, and for garbage collection, which was unique.

Central processing unit (CPU) clock speed varied depending on which instruction was being executed, but was typically around 5 MHz.

At the 3600's introduction, the smallest disk that could support the ZetaLisp software was 14 inches (360 mm) wide (most 3600s shipped with the 10½-inch Fujitsu Eagle).

Denser memory and smaller disk drives enabled the introduction of the 3620, about the size of a modern full-size tower PC.

Also contributing to the 3600 series' success was a line of bit-mapped graphics color video interfaces, combined with extremely powerful animation software.

Symbolics' Graphics Division, headquartered in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, near to the major Hollywood movie and television studios, made its S-Render and S-Paint software into industry leaders in the animation business and its 24 fps lock displays were featured in Star Trek movies.

[10][11][12][13][14] Symbolics developed the first workstations able to process high-definition television (HDTV) quality video, which enjoyed a popular following in Japan.

Symbolics' Graphics Division was sold to Nichimen Trading Company in the early 1990s, and the S-Graphics software suite (S-Paint, S-Geometry, S-Dynamics, S-Render) ported to Franz Allegro Common Lisp on Silicon Graphics (SGI) and PC computers running Windows NT.

Today it is sold as Mirai by Izware LLC, and continues to be used in major motion pictures (most famously in New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings), video games, and military simulations.

In the late 1980s (2 years later than planned), the Ivory family of single-chip Lisp Machine processors superseded the G-Machine 3650, 3620, and 3630 systems.

Sunstone was a processor similar to a reduced instruction set computer (RISC), that was to be released shortly after the Ivory.

An internal war between Noftsker and the CEO the board had hired in 1986, Brian Sear, over whether to follow Sun's suggested lead and focus on selling their software, or to re-emphasize their superior hardware, and the ensuing lack of focus when both Noftsker and Sear were fired from the company caused sales to plummet.

This, combined with some ill-advised real estate deals by company management during the boom years (they had entered into large long-term lease obligations in California), drove Symbolics into bankruptcy.

Symbolics continued as an enterprise with very limited revenues, supported mainly by service contracts on the remaining MacIvory, UX-1200, UX-1201, and other machines still used by commercial customers.

[16] In 2011, the United States Department of Defense (US DoD) awarded Symbolics a 5 year contract for maintenance work, ending in September 2016.

A local area network system called Chaosnet had been invented for the Lisp Machine (predating the commercial availability of Ethernet).

Genera would, using hints from its distributed namespace database (somewhat similar to Domain Name System (DNS), but more comprehensive, like parts of Xerox's Grapevine), automatically select the best protocol combination to use when connecting to network service.

The most popular application program for the Symbolics Lisp Machine was the ICAD computer-aided engineering system.

Electronic CAD software on the Symbolics Lisp Machine was used to develop the first implementation of the Hewlett-Packard Precision Architecture (PA-RISC).