For much of its history, SK8 remained a research project, and inspired a number of other Apple projects like AppleScript, as well as seeing use as a prototyping platform. Although around 1993 a team was assigned by the Apple Product Division to release a SK8 runtime, the limitation of the Mac's capabilities as well as the shift to the PowerPC chip made such a large project intractable. With the bulk of the original vision completed and no easy path to release as part of MacOS, active development ended in 1996–1997, and the Macintosh Common Lisp source code for the entire project was released to the public in 1997.