Interesting: when did the Lisp Machine actually ship as a product? And did it have a mouse from day one? According to the Wikipedia article it looks like something may have shipped in 1980 for $70,000 per unit...
MIT never made Lisp Machines as a product. The ones made at MIT were hand-made for use only at MIT. (Well, there was a robotic wire-wrapping machine that did a lot of the work automatically, and there was another robot that would automatically test the connectivity of all the wires. IIRC, it would take a couple of weeks for the robotic connectivity tester just to test one backplane.)
Most of the people involved with designing the Lisp Machines ultimately left MIT, however, to start companies to manufacture and sell them. The most prominent of these was Symbolics. There was also LMI.
And yes, Lisp Machines were very expensive personal computers. But computers for "professionals" were generally pretty expensive at the time. A timesharing computer that could handle 20 or 30 users could easily cost $1 million.
How much did the mouse for a Lisp Machine cost? IIRC, around $250. Economies of scale, and all that.... Yes, Lisp Machines always had mice.
Btw, it was the founding of Symbolics and LMI that prompted Richard Stallman to become a free software radical. He stayed at MIT, and spent a lot of his time porting back to MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp the improvements made to it by Symbolics. This is why Stallman came up with the GPL. He was galled that Symbolics had hijacked MIT's open code and had made it proprietary.
@nessus42: Thanks for the info. Another question is how intrinsic the mouse was to use of the machine and did it have more than one button? Part of the genius of the Mac design was doing with one button what Xerox did (badly) with three. (Yes, other companies later added more buttons all over again, but the Xerox UI, which I used briefly, required using different buttons for distinct operations in a way that, once you'd used a Mac mouse, made no sense at all.)
The mouse was completely intrinsic to the Lisp Machine. Though I'm sure that most people would consider the GUI rather ugly and primitive by today's standards. Think Emacs for X11.
The mouse was a three button mouse. The way it worked certainly made sense to me at the time, but it was made for nerds. Apple certainly did a ton of great work to make personal computers usable (and affordable) by normal people.
