7 ms·

Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of heterogeneous engineering (2001) [pdf]

90 points by tmalsburg2 6y ago

mepian 6y ago
One of the founders of Symbolics, Dan Weinreb, commented on this article: https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/ https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/
- antonvs 6y ago
  In case anyone else shares my initial confusion, Weinreb's comment on this article is at the very end of the above link: > I just came across “Symbolics, Inc: A failure of heterogeneous engineering” by Alvin Graylin, Kari Anne Hoir Kjolaas, Jonathan Loflin, and Jimmie D. Walker III (it doesn’t say with whom they are affiliated, and there is no date), at http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Symbolics.pdf http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Sym... > This is an excellent paper, and if you are interested in what happened to Symbolics, it’s a must-read. His comments follow that.
smarx007 6y ago
I am sorry for the offtopic, but how a number of CS experts who authored the article could get text kerning so wrong in the PDF? Or is it a scan of some paper source?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  What makes you think CS experts know or care about text rendering?
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    One of the great CS experts created one of the great text rendering and layout systems, TeX.
- mjn 6y ago
  Seems to depend on the PDF viewer (font issues?). The kerning is almost unreadably bad in macOS's PDF viewer (Preview), but looks perfectly fine in Firefox's built-in PDF viewer on the same machine.
  - smarx007 6y ago
    I do apologise, looks perfect in Acrobat Reader.
- gumby 6y ago
  Weren’t the authors of that paper from the business school?
granularity 6y ago
I wasn't aware of the Symbolics / SDI connection: > The market created by funding from SDI was quite forgiving. The government was interested in creating complex Lisp programs and Symbolics machines were the leading alternative at that time. Officials who allocated funds for SDI did not demand cost-effective results from their research funds and hence the expert-systems companies boomed during this period. Sorry to be glib but, maybe we should be grateful we got an AI winter, not a nuclear winter.
- pinewurst 6y ago
  It is amusing (in a way) to think about that era's protests from the likes of CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility). Specifically that software systems of a certain complexity (LoC) weren't even possible - yet even current phones transcend these numbers by orders of magnitude.
  - wrs 6y ago
    It was a long time ago, but wasn’t the idea that systems of a certain complexity with a very high reliability are impossible? My phone, at least, is not a paragon of reliability.
    - pinewurst 6y ago
      I don’t think they were that clear about reliability metrics. It was obscure but the slightly older Safeguard ABM software load was of that order of complexity magnitude and tested reliability. Thank goodness of course we never had a real test. Admittedly I have a small axe to grind, having known some of those CPSR people.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  I went to Hungary in '87 to present a paper on semiconductor point defects, funded by SDI money from AFNOR. Soviets were particularly interested in defects because their processes had a lot of them; their idea was to find a way to make the devices work right anyway. It is why they were always 10 years behind, and part of why the Mig 25 had vacuum tubes. (It did work...)
slivanes 6y ago
Trivia: SYMBOLICS.COM was the first ever .com domain registered.
- Wistar 6y ago
  A list of the 100 oldest .com domain registrations: https://theforrester.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/the-100-oldest-domains-on-the-internet/ https://theforrester.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/the-100-oldest...
Animats 6y ago
That's not really what went wrong with Symbolics. What really went wrong is mentioned in the article, though. "Expert systems" were not really very useful. Another reason that Lisp machines were in high demand (despite a general lack of results) is due to a "natural trajectory" phenomenon. AI, and especially expert systems, were seen as the future of computing. This is due to hype generated by Feigenbaum, a Stanford University professor. Tom Knight claims that Artificial Intelligence was oversold primarily because Feigenbaum fueled outrageous hype that computers would be able, for example, to replace medical doctors within 10 years. Additional hype was generated by the Japanese government sponsoring of the "Fifth Generation" project. This project, essentially a massive effort by the Japanese to develop machines that think, sparked a nationalistic chord in America. SDI funding in some ways was a means to hedge the possible ramifications of the "superior" AI technology of Japan. I went through Stanford CS when Feigenbaum was hyping away. For the hype, read his book, "The Fifth Generation". Much of the Stanford CS department was convinced that expert systems would change the world, despite having almost nothing actually working. It was pathetic. Especially the aftermath, the "AI Winter", when I once saw Feigenbaum wandering around the building amidst empty cubicles, looking lost. Symbolics had some big technical problems. The biggest was that they didn't use a microprocessor. They had a CPU built up from smaller components. So their cost was inherently higher, their hardware was less reliable, and they didn't benefit from progress in microprocessors. Once people got LISP compilers running on Motorola 68000 UNIX workstations, LISP machines were not really needed. Franz LISP on a Sun was comparable to using a Symbolics (we had both where I worked), and the refrigerator-sized Symbolics wasn't worth the trouble. Symbolics was also noted for having a poor maintenance organization. They had to send someone out to fix your refrigerator-sized machine; you couldn't just swap boards as on workstations. Eventually Symbolics shrank their hardware down to reasonable size, but by then, nobody cared.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  It was a cultural problem. Symbolics were really trying to build their own LISP-specific DEC-10-a-like, using DEC-style mini and mainframe computer design traditions, but at slightly lower cost. There were a number of projects like that around at the time, including the Three Rivers/ICL PERQ which was optimised for PASCAL, and arguably DEC's PDP-11 range whose entire architecture was closely aligned with C and eventually C++, pointers and all. These were all interesting machines without a future, because the early 80s were a crossover when it turned out that model was too bloated to be sustainable. DEC scraped through the bottleneck with Alpha, but couldn't keep it together as business. Meanwhile the 16-bit and early 32-bit architectures were eating everyone's lunch. SGI and Sun flared up in this space and died when their price/performance ratio couldn't compete with commoditised PCs and Macs - which happened sooner than hardly anyone expected. This is obvious now, but it wasn't at all obvious then. The workstation market and the language-optimised market both looked like they had a real future, when in fact they were industrial throw-backs to the postwar corporate model. So it wasn't just the AI winter that killed Symbolics - it was the fact that both hardware and software were essentially nostalgic knock-offs of product models from 5-10 years earlier that were already outdated. Meanwhile the real revolution was happening elsewhere, starting with 8-bit micros - which were toys, but very popular toys - and eventually leading to ARM's lead today, via Wintel, with Motorola, the Mac, and the NeXT/MacOS as a kind of tangent. The same cycle is playing out now with massively accelerated GPU hardware for AI applications, which will eventually be commoditised - probably in an integrated way. IMO Apple are the only company to be thinking about this integration in hardware, and no one at all seems to be considering what it means for AI-enhanced commoditised non-specialised software yet. Apple are giving it some thought, Google are thinking about it technologically, plenty of people are attempting Data Engineering - but still, the current bar for application ideas seems very quite limited compared to the possibilities a personal commoditised integrated architecture could offer, because again current platforms have become centralised and industrialised. There's a strong centrifugal and individualistic tendency in personal computing which I suspect will subvert that - and we'll see signs of it long before the end of the decade.
ncmncm 6y ago
They about lost me at page 10, "In C/C++, the dimensions of an array must be declared at the beginning of a function)". First, no opening "(". What kind of Lisp hacker does this? Second, both in C and in C++ functions can (of course) take variable-sized arrays. (And, there is no such language as "C/C++"). If you are trying to explain why a Lisp company failed, is it the right place to put obviously false propaganda about the winners? On page 14, several howlers in one, "[Word tagging] eliminates the need for data type declarations in programs and also catches bugs at runtime, which dramatically improves system reliability." Where to start? Dynamic type errors are a major cause of program failures in obligate runtime-bound languages, today. Word tagging turned out to be a dead end, easily outmatched by page tagging in normal architectures. Higher up on page 14: "... an extra instruction in the final 386 architecture to facilitate garbage collection." What instruction? Was there one, really? Also on page 14: Asserting novelty of virtual memory in the '80s, really? Page 16: Calling out the importance of their proprietary debugger gives the lie to the claim on page 14. Page 20: "Many potential customers of Symbolics were interested solely in Symbolics' software. However, customers could not buy the software without purchasing a expensive LISP machine." It looks like the authors would like to think the software was attractive. But of course any such potential customers could get the same software from MIT without a 5x$ machine hanging off. Did they? Page 28: "The Symbolics documentation was outstanding ... former Symbolics employees still treasure them." People developing important things can't afford to spend enough attention on docs to make them outstanding, because the important things demand that attention. And, yes, the kerning is positively abominable. No TeX?
- pinewurst 6y ago
  There’s no assertion of inventing virtual memory - only that the platform had it as a feature. And for “novelty”, yes it was for personal, even minicomputer, systems at the end of the 1970s when they were conceived. Also you’re confusing Symbolics software (post LM2) with the very barebones MIT CADR release. It was far better than that and the closely related LMI release. RMS rantings on this subject have only the most tenuous connection to reality (much like their originator ;). Finally, Symbolics online hypertext docs (via Document Examiner) really were great. When one is attempting to expand the market for a powerful, yet esoteric system, good docs make that system more approachable. Sadly I think they really did run out of Lisp hackers as an audience but they did try.
2sk21 6y ago
We had an LMI machine in my department (competitor to symbolics) - and it was no better either. It hardly ever worked and was scrapped soon after it was bought. According to the system admin, the machine was very temperature sensitive and would not work other than in a narrow band of temperatures.
inetsee 6y ago
I am confused. From the paper: "Thomas F. Knight, Jack Holloway and Richard Greenblatt developed the first LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late 1970s." From Wikipedia: "John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Shouldn't the paper say "Symbolics LISP"?
- lispm 6y ago
  It should have said "the first LISP Machine". Which was a personal computer with a GUI, built to support the development and execution of large Lisp software. Symbolics was a company founded later to commercial that research - at the same time with its competitor Lisp Machines, Inc.
peter303 6y ago
Same issue with other 1980s custom hardware like mini-super scientific computers. It would take 3+ years for a new hardware generation. Intel or Motorola would have at least three generations in that span and nearly catch up for a fraction of the engineering cost. Companies like Convex, Masspar and Thinking Machines rarely made it to their 3rd hardware generation.
andrewem 6y ago
This is a student paper, and it’s from 1998 not 2001, according to this page which lists many other student papers from that course over several years: http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/projects_whole.html http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/projects_whole.html
aidenn0 6y ago
Another resource I found that is related is a Thesis paper "If It Works, It's not AI" https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/80558/43557450-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/80558/4355745...
koeng 6y ago
I'd like to point out that Tom Knight, one of the scientists mentioned, now is considered one of the Godfathers of synthetic biology. He made a pivot in the late 1990s/early 2000s. If you'd like to read one of the papers that inspired him to make the change, read "The Completeness of Molecular Biology"[0]. It is a truly inspiring paper published in 1984 that is still relevant to synthetic biology. [0] https://static.ias.edu/pitp/2019/sites/pitp/files/morowitz-completeness_of_mol._bio._copy.pdf https://static.ias.edu/pitp/2019/sites/pitp/files/morowitz-c...

90 points by tmalsburg2 6y ago

One of the founders of Symbolics, Dan Weinreb, commented on this article: https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/ https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/

antonvs 6y ago
In case anyone else shares my initial confusion, Weinreb's comment on this article is at the very end of the above link: > I just came across “Symbolics, Inc: A failure of heterogeneous engineering” by Alvin Graylin, Kari Anne Hoir Kjolaas, Jonathan Loflin, and Jimmie D. Walker III (it doesn’t say with whom they are affiliated, and there is no date), at http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Symbolics.pdf http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Sym... > This is an excellent paper, and if you are interested in what happened to Symbolics, it’s a must-read. His comments follow that.

smarx007 6y ago

I am sorry for the offtopic, but how a number of CS experts who authored the article could get text kerning so wrong in the PDF? Or is it a scan of some paper source?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
What makes you think CS experts know or care about text rendering?
- nitrogen 6y ago
  One of the great CS experts created one of the great text rendering and layout systems, TeX.
mjn 6y ago
Seems to depend on the PDF viewer (font issues?). The kerning is almost unreadably bad in macOS's PDF viewer (Preview), but looks perfectly fine in Firefox's built-in PDF viewer on the same machine.
- smarx007 6y ago
  I do apologise, looks perfect in Acrobat Reader.
gumby 6y ago
Weren’t the authors of that paper from the business school?

granularity 6y ago

I wasn't aware of the Symbolics / SDI connection: > The market created by funding from SDI was quite forgiving. The government was interested in creating complex Lisp programs and Symbolics machines were the leading alternative at that time. Officials who allocated funds for SDI did not demand cost-effective results from their research funds and hence the expert-systems companies boomed during this period. Sorry to be glib but, maybe we should be grateful we got an AI winter, not a nuclear winter.

pinewurst 6y ago
It is amusing (in a way) to think about that era's protests from the likes of CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility). Specifically that software systems of a certain complexity (LoC) weren't even possible - yet even current phones transcend these numbers by orders of magnitude.
- wrs 6y ago
  It was a long time ago, but wasn’t the idea that systems of a certain complexity with a very high reliability are impossible? My phone, at least, is not a paragon of reliability.
  - pinewurst 6y ago
    I don’t think they were that clear about reliability metrics. It was obscure but the slightly older Safeguard ABM software load was of that order of complexity magnitude and tested reliability. Thank goodness of course we never had a real test. Admittedly I have a small axe to grind, having known some of those CPSR people.
ncmncm 6y ago
I went to Hungary in '87 to present a paper on semiconductor point defects, funded by SDI money from AFNOR. Soviets were particularly interested in defects because their processes had a lot of them; their idea was to find a way to make the devices work right anyway. It is why they were always 10 years behind, and part of why the Mig 25 had vacuum tubes. (It did work...)

slivanes 6y ago

Trivia: SYMBOLICS.COM was the first ever .com domain registered.

Wistar 6y ago
A list of the 100 oldest .com domain registrations: https://theforrester.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/the-100-oldest-domains-on-the-internet/ https://theforrester.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/the-100-oldest...

Animats 6y ago

That's not really what went wrong with Symbolics. What really went wrong is mentioned in the article, though. "Expert systems" were not really very useful. Another reason that Lisp machines were in high demand (despite a general lack of results) is due to a "natural trajectory" phenomenon. AI, and especially expert systems, were seen as the future of computing. This is due to hype generated by Feigenbaum, a Stanford University professor. Tom Knight claims that Artificial Intelligence was oversold primarily because Feigenbaum fueled outrageous hype that computers would be able, for example, to replace medical doctors within 10 years. Additional hype was generated by the Japanese government sponsoring of the "Fifth Generation" project. This project, essentially a massive effort by the Japanese to develop machines that think, sparked a nationalistic chord in America. SDI funding in some ways was a means to hedge the possible ramifications of the "superior" AI technology of Japan. I went through Stanford CS when Feigenbaum was hyping away. For the hype, read his book, "The Fifth Generation". Much of the Stanford CS department was convinced that expert systems would change the world, despite having almost nothing actually working. It was pathetic. Especially the aftermath, the "AI Winter", when I once saw Feigenbaum wandering around the building amidst empty cubicles, looking lost. Symbolics had some big technical problems. The biggest was that they didn't use a microprocessor. They had a CPU built up from smaller components. So their cost was inherently higher, their hardware was less reliable, and they didn't benefit from progress in microprocessors. Once people got LISP compilers running on Motorola 68000 UNIX workstations, LISP machines were not really needed. Franz LISP on a Sun was comparable to using a Symbolics (we had both where I worked), and the refrigerator-sized Symbolics wasn't worth the trouble. Symbolics was also noted for having a poor maintenance organization. They had to send someone out to fix your refrigerator-sized machine; you couldn't just swap boards as on workstations. Eventually Symbolics shrank their hardware down to reasonable size, but by then, nobody cared.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
It was a cultural problem. Symbolics were really trying to build their own LISP-specific DEC-10-a-like, using DEC-style mini and mainframe computer design traditions, but at slightly lower cost. There were a number of projects like that around at the time, including the Three Rivers/ICL PERQ which was optimised for PASCAL, and arguably DEC's PDP-11 range whose entire architecture was closely aligned with C and eventually C++, pointers and all. These were all interesting machines without a future, because the early 80s were a crossover when it turned out that model was too bloated to be sustainable. DEC scraped through the bottleneck with Alpha, but couldn't keep it together as business. Meanwhile the 16-bit and early 32-bit architectures were eating everyone's lunch. SGI and Sun flared up in this space and died when their price/performance ratio couldn't compete with commoditised PCs and Macs - which happened sooner than hardly anyone expected. This is obvious now, but it wasn't at all obvious then. The workstation market and the language-optimised market both looked like they had a real future, when in fact they were industrial throw-backs to the postwar corporate model. So it wasn't just the AI winter that killed Symbolics - it was the fact that both hardware and software were essentially nostalgic knock-offs of product models from 5-10 years earlier that were already outdated. Meanwhile the real revolution was happening elsewhere, starting with 8-bit micros - which were toys, but very popular toys - and eventually leading to ARM's lead today, via Wintel, with Motorola, the Mac, and the NeXT/MacOS as a kind of tangent. The same cycle is playing out now with massively accelerated GPU hardware for AI applications, which will eventually be commoditised - probably in an integrated way. IMO Apple are the only company to be thinking about this integration in hardware, and no one at all seems to be considering what it means for AI-enhanced commoditised non-specialised software yet. Apple are giving it some thought, Google are thinking about it technologically, plenty of people are attempting Data Engineering - but still, the current bar for application ideas seems very quite limited compared to the possibilities a personal commoditised integrated architecture could offer, because again current platforms have become centralised and industrialised. There's a strong centrifugal and individualistic tendency in personal computing which I suspect will subvert that - and we'll see signs of it long before the end of the decade.

ncmncm 6y ago

They about lost me at page 10, "In C/C++, the dimensions of an array must be declared at the beginning of a function)". First, no opening "(". What kind of Lisp hacker does this? Second, both in C and in C++ functions can (of course) take variable-sized arrays. (And, there is no such language as "C/C++"). If you are trying to explain why a Lisp company failed, is it the right place to put obviously false propaganda about the winners? On page 14, several howlers in one, "[Word tagging] eliminates the need for data type declarations in programs and also catches bugs at runtime, which dramatically improves system reliability." Where to start? Dynamic type errors are a major cause of program failures in obligate runtime-bound languages, today. Word tagging turned out to be a dead end, easily outmatched by page tagging in normal architectures. Higher up on page 14: "... an extra instruction in the final 386 architecture to facilitate garbage collection." What instruction? Was there one, really? Also on page 14: Asserting novelty of virtual memory in the '80s, really? Page 16: Calling out the importance of their proprietary debugger gives the lie to the claim on page 14. Page 20: "Many potential customers of Symbolics were interested solely in Symbolics' software. However, customers could not buy the software without purchasing a expensive LISP machine." It looks like the authors would like to think the software was attractive. But of course any such potential customers could get the same software from MIT without a 5x$ machine hanging off. Did they? Page 28: "The Symbolics documentation was outstanding ... former Symbolics employees still treasure them." People developing important things can't afford to spend enough attention on docs to make them outstanding, because the important things demand that attention. And, yes, the kerning is positively abominable. No TeX?

pinewurst 6y ago
There’s no assertion of inventing virtual memory - only that the platform had it as a feature. And for “novelty”, yes it was for personal, even minicomputer, systems at the end of the 1970s when they were conceived. Also you’re confusing Symbolics software (post LM2) with the very barebones MIT CADR release. It was far better than that and the closely related LMI release. RMS rantings on this subject have only the most tenuous connection to reality (much like their originator ;). Finally, Symbolics online hypertext docs (via Document Examiner) really were great. When one is attempting to expand the market for a powerful, yet esoteric system, good docs make that system more approachable. Sadly I think they really did run out of Lisp hackers as an audience but they did try.

2sk21 6y ago

We had an LMI machine in my department (competitor to symbolics) - and it was no better either. It hardly ever worked and was scrapped soon after it was bought. According to the system admin, the machine was very temperature sensitive and would not work other than in a narrow band of temperatures.

inetsee 6y ago

I am confused. From the paper: "Thomas F. Knight, Jack Holloway and Richard Greenblatt developed the first LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late 1970s." From Wikipedia: "John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Shouldn't the paper say "Symbolics LISP"?

lispm 6y ago
It should have said "the first LISP Machine". Which was a personal computer with a GUI, built to support the development and execution of large Lisp software. Symbolics was a company founded later to commercial that research - at the same time with its competitor Lisp Machines, Inc.

peter303 6y ago

Same issue with other 1980s custom hardware like mini-super scientific computers. It would take 3+ years for a new hardware generation. Intel or Motorola would have at least three generations in that span and nearly catch up for a fraction of the engineering cost. Companies like Convex, Masspar and Thinking Machines rarely made it to their 3rd hardware generation.

andrewem 6y ago

This is a student paper, and it’s from 1998 not 2001, according to this page which lists many other student papers from that course over several years: http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/projects_whole.html http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/projects_whole.html

aidenn0 6y ago

Another resource I found that is related is a Thesis paper "If It Works, It's not AI" https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/80558/43557450-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/80558/4355745...

koeng 6y ago

I'd like to point out that Tom Knight, one of the scientists mentioned, now is considered one of the Godfathers of synthetic biology. He made a pivot in the late 1990s/early 2000s. If you'd like to read one of the papers that inspired him to make the change, read "The Completeness of Molecular Biology"[0]. It is a truly inspiring paper published in 1984 that is still relevant to synthetic biology. [0] https://static.ias.edu/pitp/2019/sites/pitp/files/morowitz-completeness_of_mol._bio._copy.pdf https://static.ias.edu/pitp/2019/sites/pitp/files/morowitz-c...