I wonder if a kickstarter to create a new Lisp Machine could work.

I envision something like a Raspberry Pi, but with the hardware designed to run Lisp, and taking inspiration from the original Lisp Machines.

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you have already all the hardware to run Lisp. There is very little reason to develop special hardware. Lisp runs nicely on an ARM processor.

Actually some the first ARM processors were supposed to run a Lisp operating system. When Apple did the research&development for the Apple Newton, they originally attempted to run a Lisp-like system on mobile systems like PDAs and tablets. This Lisp dialect was derived mostly from Scheme and Common Lisp - the language was eventually called Dylan. Apple had ARM systems in their lab which ran a Dylan OS. When they at one point chose the ARM processor, Apple invested in ARM and they used a chip which was able to support a garbage collected language. Unfortunately these Lisp operating systems by Apple did not reach the market and Apple instead sold the Apple Newton with an OS kernel written in C++ and the software on top written and scripted in NewtonScript - a language with many aspects from Lisp - incl. garbage collection.

AnimalMuppet

Could you explain what you mean by a "Lisp operating system"? I understand the idea of Lisp as a language, but what does Lisp as an OS mean?

lispm

Historically it's an operating system written in Lisp, typically running as a Lisp runtime+image on the metal. Itself providing memory management, interrupt handling, process scheduling, network I/O, graphics, keyboard, mouse, windows, applications ... and everything else a typical OS provides.

For a recent attempt see: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano