Symbolics has 4 pages of scanned marketing-brochures. STILL.
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Symbolics is/was brilliant, but I don’t find the recent history of the site interesting. It was still decent until about 2010 when this new character made his museum page. The thing is, that I thought the existing site was already a time-capsule, and served as a better museum that what it was replaced with.
I tried running an OpenGenera virtual machine a few months ago with no success, I’ll probably try again sometime. It seems like a neat environment.
I’m looking forward to the birth of the first dot-corn website!
One of the best time capsules will always be the Space Jam website:
http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
But if it is sold to an unrelated party, is it truly the same domain? Or a different domain, with the same name?
The Song Retains the Name
Pretty sure Symbolic didn’t “buy” the domain name in 1985. They were free until sometime in the mid/late 90s. After that, everybody had to start paying a fee to offset the cost of the … uh, the cost of the … uh … well, I’m sure the cost was necessary.
Symbolics did not develop LISP, John McCarthy did in 1958. Symbolics did make a LISP computer.
They did develop LISP, even though they didn’t first devise it. Symbolics and LMI were both based upon the original CONS and CADR LISP machines at MIT. It’s implementation was referred to at times as “LISP Machine LISP”, and the extensions to it for Symbolics hardware were marketed as “ZetaLisp”. Many of the features of these were folded into the first standard for Common Lisp. So, they were at least partially responsible for what Common Lisp became.
Develop no, offer suggestions for improvement yes. I view Symbolics in the same category as the people who did hardware for UCSD Pascal (pcode); basically creating hardware to run code faster than plain compiled. Their initial product was introduced in 1981 (two years after the fist Common LISP standard was published). Besides MIT LISP there is Franz LISP (early 1970’s) and its descendants, one of which I use which is Cadence Skill Language. Even Scheme (which TI adopted) comes is early 1970’s.
Maybe we are using the term “develop” to mean different things.
They couldn’t simply “offer suggestions” to others when their product was Lisp running on hardware. They had to develop A Lisp which runs on their hardware. If the various Lisps of the 1970s (such as ZetaLisp, InterLisp, etc) were all compatible with the original McCarthy implementation, there would have been no need to standardize the language to Common Lisp. So how did the differences of these various implementations occur? Their vendors developed them. And even with the CL standardization process, those involved offered not only ideas but their own code to CL. Symbolics’ “Flavors” was the basis for CLOS, and “Dynamic Windows” was the basis for CLIM. Even just these two projects made quite a difference to future directions of Lisp.
I’m not saying they did not make contributions. By the time they got started many people had a vested interest in LISP. Again I would say that Common LISP was well decided (wikipedia seems to agree with me) by 1999. I’m not saying the Symbolics did not try to influence LISP, but rather by the time they came together to many people had a vested interest in LISP. BTW wikipedia does not think much of Flavors LISP. For the most part only Cadence Design Systems and Autodesk have any installed base of LISP applications.
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