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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 tradi

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hardware and software were essentially nostalgic knock-offs of product models from 5-10 years earlier that were already outdated.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.

selestify 6y ago
What drives these trends of centralization vs commodotization?
pinewurst 6y ago
"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." I really like this quote and perspective. I think it was a byproduct of period communications - not today's ubiquitous connections. Essentially it was a very small, even inbred community that talked mostly to itself. "Itself" including associated members at the likes of DARPA. And that was enough to get the funding (and closely related hype) ball rolling. There was little if any feedback from outside the crowd. Even the West Coast was another world to a certain extent. I'm reminded of XKL - a Cisco founder going into business to (initially) produce modern PDP-10s in the early 90s. Because, you know, that's what the world (even that small inbred world) was waiting for.
- gumby 6y ago
  > I'm reminded of XKL - a Cisco founder going into business to (initially) produce modern PDP-10s in the early 90s. Because, you know, that's what the world (even that small inbred world) was waiting for. That was Cisco’s actual business plan — they just sold a few routers (from a design they’d developed for Stanford) to get some bucks in the door while they geared up to build the PDP-10 clone. (Obviously the never pivoted back to the original plan).
Animats 6y ago
That it was a cultural problem is quite correct. Academic computer science was quite small in those days, and it was almost all DoD-funded. The big CS schools had PDP-10 machines, and the lesser ones had DEC VAXen. In the 1980s, the commercial market in electronics and computers passed the DoD market, first in volume and then in technology. This was a real shock to some communities. There were complaints of "premature VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) insertion" from DoD, by which they meant the commercial market using stuff DoD didn't have yet. DoD thought they were in charge of the IC industry in 1980.[1] DoD had been the big buyer in electronics since WWII, after all. By 1990, DoD was a minor player in ICs and computing. Symbolics was really a minicomputer manufacturer, building up CPUs from smaller parts. They went down with the other mini makers - DEC, Prime, Data General, Interdata, Tandem, and the rest of that crowd. That technology was obsoleted by single-chip CPUs. Many of the others hung on longer, since they had established customer bases. But they were all on the way down by the late 1980s. [1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a230012.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a230012.pdf

selestify 6y ago

What drives these trends of centralization vs commodotization?

pinewurst 6y ago

"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." I really like this quote and perspective. I think it was a byproduct of period communications - not today's ubiquitous connections. Essentially it was a very small, even inbred community that talked mostly to itself. "Itself" including associated members at the likes of DARPA. And that was enough to get the funding (and closely related hype) ball rolling. There was little if any feedback from outside the crowd. Even the West Coast was another world to a certain extent. I'm reminded of XKL - a Cisco founder going into business to (initially) produce modern PDP-10s in the early 90s. Because, you know, that's what the world (even that small inbred world) was waiting for.

gumby 6y ago
> I'm reminded of XKL - a Cisco founder going into business to (initially) produce modern PDP-10s in the early 90s. Because, you know, that's what the world (even that small inbred world) was waiting for. That was Cisco’s actual business plan — they just sold a few routers (from a design they’d developed for Stanford) to get some bucks in the door while they geared up to build the PDP-10 clone. (Obviously the never pivoted back to the original plan).

Animats 6y ago

That it was a cultural problem is quite correct. Academic computer science was quite small in those days, and it was almost all DoD-funded. The big CS schools had PDP-10 machines, and the lesser ones had DEC VAXen. In the 1980s, the commercial market in electronics and computers passed the DoD market, first in volume and then in technology. This was a real shock to some communities. There were complaints of "premature VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) insertion" from DoD, by which they meant the commercial market using stuff DoD didn't have yet. DoD thought they were in charge of the IC industry in 1980.[1] DoD had been the big buyer in electronics since WWII, after all. By 1990, DoD was a minor player in ICs and computing. Symbolics was really a minicomputer manufacturer, building up CPUs from smaller parts. They went down with the other mini makers - DEC, Prime, Data General, Interdata, Tandem, and the rest of that crowd. That technology was obsoleted by single-chip CPUs. Many of the others hung on longer, since they had established customer bases. But they were all on the way down by the late 1980s. [1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a230012.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a230012.pdf