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@screwtape @sacha @masso as far as I can tell, Emacs was one of the first Lisp implementations for Unix systems, and it was free to use, so it would have probably become pretty popular for that reason. Both the GNU project and Emacs had got started before Common Lisp was even standardized. In those days, Lisp was being implemented mostly on mainframes and minicomputers, on the Xerox Alto, and on bespoke hardware like in the case of Symbolics. But this was in parallel to development of Unix, and so Unix maybe wasn’t as widely used or popular enough at the time for anyone to bother porting Lisp to it until the 1980s after GNU started cloning Unix.

So there may well have been other Lisp implementations on Unix or it’s clones, but I don’t know enough about pre-1980s Lisp. I don’t even know what computer Steele and Sussman used to implement the first Scheme.