Scheme is big, I mean real big, ~5Meg with the default configuration. If you get the error Not enough memory for this configuration. then you'll have to try starting up a smaller Scheme. When you start up Scheme you can pass it the optional "-heap" argument, by which you can define the size of the heap space allocated to Scheme. The heap size is the amount of memory that you reserve for scheme work space, this is above and beyond the memory allocated for the Scheme program itself. The default is 200, the max heap size depends on what else you are running on the system and what type of workstation you are on. The VS3100 and DECStation3100 support heaps up to 800, where as all other workstations usually support heaps up to 400 (scheme actually supports heaps of up to 3000, but athena workstations don't have enough memory) The actual heap size in terms of Megabytes of physical memory used by scheme is (heapsize x 4 x 100KBytes), so a heap size of 250 = 1MegaByte of physical memory. Scheme actually allocates twice this amount of space since it does two space garbage collection, so "-heap 250" will allocate 2 Megs of heap memory. To startup scheme with the -heap option do: /mit/scheme/{vax, rt, or decmips}bin/scheme -heap 100 where you can replace the 100 with the largest value that works. If you use 6.001 Scheme add the argument: -band /mit/scheme/{vax, rt, or decmips}-7.0/lib/sicp.bin If once you've done this you still get the same error, then you'll have to kill off some other programs before starting scheme.