A detailed survey on the motivations, design, applications, current status, and limitations of computers designed for symbolic processing is provided. Symbolic processing computations are performed at the word, relation, or meaning levels, and the knowledge used in symbolic applications may be fuzzy, uncertain, indeterminate, and ill represented. Various techniques for knowledge representation and processing are discussed from both the designers' and users' points of view. The design and choice of a suitable language for symbolic processing and the mapping of applications into a software architecture are then considered. The process of refining the application requirements into hardware and software architectures is treated, and state-of-art sequential and parallel computers designed for symbolic processing are discussed. >