11 ms·

Owner of Symbolics Lisp machines IP is interested in a non-commercial release

230 points by mepian 3y ago

User23 3y ago
Is there still some kind of revenue stream from Symbolics Lisp or does the owner just want it to die with him?
- solarmist 3y ago
  It’s a pain to do the work associated, with no personal upside, so it’s probably neglect more than anything.
  - speed_spread 3y ago
    Pain? The hardest part is probably finding a five inch floppy drive connected to a machine that can push to GitHub. Even that could be outsourced to some trusted resourceful LISP enthusiast.
    - linguae 3y ago
      There's a lot of preparatory and legal work involved in preparing a proprietary software project for release as an open source project. It's not as simple as just pushing the source tree to GitHub and calling it a day. For example, if portions of the code were licensed by other other copyright holders, permission from them is required. There are other cases where the code needs to be examined before release in order to edit or remove materials that are personally identifying, embarrassing, or could cause legal issues if publicly disclosed.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it. Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
        lispm 3y ago
        > mystique would be lost People would also discover that the architecture is not simple, but grown over a decade while there was rapid development of the basics people take for granted: standards, languages, networking, operating systems, ... In the mid 80s TCP/IP was an expensive add on for Genera. Later it was made a part of the OS. But development stopped before it could add things like IPv6, Unicode, basic security, HTTPS, and other things. One could add it, but then one had to learn ZetaLisp (70s/80s), Flavors (early 80s), Symbolics Common Lisp (80s/90s), an object-oriented networking stack architecture from the 80s, ... You would have a second life in a technology stack somewhere between the past and the future, in a parallel world.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. Still I also think these kinds of "live editing" environments don't translate well into some modern "best practices" around version control, deployment, versioning, etc. Remembering my experience with LambdaMOO & similar and then later Smalltalk/Squeak and recently with doing stuff with Julia's REPL, etc. They're fascinating and fairly productive, but I am not convinced about this technique's ability to scale.
        lispm 3y ago
        > It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. It may not have the fancy UI, may not have a fancy user experience, may not be an operating system, may have a more primitive Lisp dialect, may not have a good multi-threading story, ... but it might exist and people put a lot of work into it: GNU Emacs and its extensions. That's how it is...
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I think half the magic I associate with the Symbolics products is that they also made their own hardware, custom built for Lisp. Which is kinda neat and magical, if entirely impractical. That plus the lovely keyboards, nice case design, etc. etc.
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    Please. Dude could day “hey I want to open source this, someone do the work for me and show me where to sign” and people would trip over themselves rushing to make it happen.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  Yeah, my thoughts precisely. Genera is obsolete. I cannot imagine what possible profit could be made. There may be value in the design that could be of benefit even today, but I cannot understand people who hoard old IP.
  - the-smug-one 3y ago
    My guess is that there are maintenance contracts which can be quite lucrative.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Still? That would surprise me.
      - lallysingh 3y ago
        Someone's in a pickle if they need support. The older the contract, the more it's probably worth.
- nabla9 3y ago
  In 2021 there was port to Apple M1 MacOS, so it seems like there can be small revenue streams still. Open Portable Genrea runs on 64-bit x86 and Arm.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Gary Palter has made it work both on Linux and macOS, both x86-64 and ARM64. He also brought the original Open Genera for DEC Alpha to the same software level.
linguae 3y ago
This would be a major development should this come to pass. Even if Genera doesn’t get released under a OSS-compliant license, this will be beneficial for hobbyists and historians (though I don’t know how restrictive non-commercial licenses are for people in academia), similar to the recent release of the Apple Lisa source code (which has similar stipulations). I’ve always wanted to use Symbolics Genera, but I was born around the time of the AI winter of the late 1980s. I wonder if there were any efforts in the 1990s or 2000s to create a FOSS clone of Genera in the vein of either the GNU project, the Linux kernel, and 4.4BSD and its descendants. I heard that Genera is quite complex, but complexity didn’t stop ReactOS and Haiku from chugging along after all these years.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  You'd hope that that these folks could at least do a GPL-style/copyleft license, which would effectively prevent (non-negotiated) commercial use anyways, while still enabling the open source community to enhance and distribute?
  - racingmars 3y ago
    The GPL does not prohibit commercial use at all. Often when historical stuff like this is released for "non-commercial use", they're not just talking about not using the code itself in your own non-open-source product, but they mean "you can't run your business on this software." The GPL certainly doesn't stop a commercial entity from downloading and using a GPL-licensed accounting package such a GnuCash to keep track of their company finances.
    - jasonjayr 3y ago
      Having never used a lisp machine, and only having a basic understanding of it -- but if the whole system is a lisp image + apps are just calling into the OS as if they were lisp functions, woulden't a 'pure GPL' be problematic becuase EVERYTHING running in it would have to be GPL? Are there clear linking boundaries in symbolics lisp between apps + the OS ?
pdw 3y ago
Don't hold your breath, these rumors have been going for well over a decade: 2018: "The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330 2014: "The problem is that the Symbolics IP is now owned by John Mallery; he has stated he has plans for making it available but so far (several years) has not yet done so." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034 The software itself can easily be found these days, if you're interested for hobbyist reasons.
- mepian 3y ago
  This is more than a rumor: Gary Palter is one of the last employees of Symbolics who wrote the emulator in the first place, and he communicated with the owner. He co-authored this article about the development of the emulator: http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html The fact that he still has hope is significant.
  - appleflaxen 3y ago
    Is he the copyright holder? Being the last employee doesn't have anything to do with copyright, if you're an employee of a company.
    - skissane 3y ago
      The company (Symbolics) was owned by Andrew Topping. Topping died, and Symbolics' IP was sold at his deceased estate auction. It was bought by John C. Mallery, a (former?) MIT professor, so he is the current copyright holder. (Or at least he asserts he is–some have expressed doubts over the legitimacy of the transaction, but the only way to get a definitive answer to that would be through a lawsuit, and nobody thus far has wanted to go down that path–the risks are that one might spend a fortune on lawyers and Mallery could win.) Gary Palter was one of the last employees, and as such doesn't own the copyrights. However, he is in personal contact with Mallery, and the enhancements he has made to Genera (such as porting it to ARM) have been done with Mallery's permission. Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Palter has never clearly explained it, although I imagine he doesn't want to burn his bridges with Mallery, and that may limit what he's able to publicly say.
behnamoh 3y ago
I just don’t know why much of the Lisp ecosystem is closed/commercial, like if you wanna do Common lisp you have to pay for Lisp Works. Could it be one reason for Lisp’s low popularity? If I want to pick up Python now, there’s amazing free tooling for it. If I want to pick up Common lisp, well …
- Jach 3y ago
  Just use SBCL - https://www.sbcl.org/ https://www.sbcl.org/ Pick an editor: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Good enough for games (and other commercial offerings) - https://kandria.com/ https://kandria.com/
  - mepian 3y ago
    It's definitely good enough for Google: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-common-lisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-comm...
    - dietrichepp 3y ago
      ITA software is an acquisition, and I’m sure most of the Lisp development at Google is just done by engineers tweaking their .emacs files. The problem of parsing data from airlines is fiendishly hard. There are a ton of different rules for how to calculate prices, and all sorts of deals and promotions that may affect a particular route on a particular day. If you have a system which can parse this data, then you wouldn’t want to rewrite it. I’ve read a number of articles about ITA Software’s Lisp code and it’s really interesting. Lisp may be a critical part of ITA’s success, but “good enough for Google” is probably the wrong take here—Google, I’m sure, purchased a company to add its working product to their portfolio. I doubt that Google’s processes would allow someone to ale a new product in Lisp.
      - mepian 3y ago
        I meant SBCL specifically, not Common Lisp in general. They could have been using LispWorks or Allegro CL instead, but they aren't.
dumdumchan 3y ago
Just a virtual machine that runs a lisp os. Might as well just run clojure on jvm
- linguae 3y ago
  What makes Symbolics Genera interesting is not the fact it’s a Common Lisp implementation; there’s SBCL, ABCL, and plenty of others. It’s the development environment inside Genera that many users fondly remember and make it stand out even today. The excitement about the broader availability of Genera centers around its development environment.
- shrubble 3y ago
  Even the device drivers were written in Lisp.
LispSporks22 3y ago
Maybe we can save up and buy it from this dude, then open it something like what happened with Blender? I hate the idea of hobbyist licenses - it reminds me of the torturous OpenVMS hobbyist program or whatever the hell that incomprehensible situation is. Also, curious how old is the IP owner in this situation? What happens if he croaks with it?
- ndiddy 3y ago
  AFAIK Symbolics is basically a one-man operation, and the owner has been unwilling to sell the rights to Genera for any price.
  - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
    i doubt he was offered >= 1 bln $. that's probably the price he's waiting for
  - LispSporks22 3y ago
    Damn that’s too bad. Part of computing history and all.. wonder why he is motivated that way
    - mepian 3y ago
      Maybe he's still hoping to use it to implement his "wish": http://web.archive.org/web/20011107164802/www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/jcma.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011107164802/www.ai.mit.edu/peo... "Wish List: a knowledge-based operating system running on a MIMD parallel machine. The system should exceed the productivity of the Lisp Machine by several orders of magnitude and integrate seamlessly with a global knowledge base and with a global computational environment." Looks like he recently registered a new company: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nh/872107 https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nh/872107
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Does he actually have any connection to Genera or even Symbolics?
johndmcmaster 3y ago
Some friends and I tried to buy chips from them recently. However, they wanted a relatively significant amount of money for them that more accurately reflected commercial rates than historical collectible prices. Seems like they are operating as a corporation still and may still be protective over their IP Background: I maintain the largest die photography collection on the internet. I wanted to take some die pictures for historical reasons. Fortunately I was able to get one to image from a third party, although I haven't posted it yet
- lispm 3y ago
  I would think that in the few remaining CPUs specially designed to run Lisp have a significant historical value. Just having a working original Lisp Machine is extremely rare these days - given that there were probably only 10000 ever being made and the older ones (from the early to mid 80s) are extremely fragile.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    They’re not that fragile.
- eschaton 3y ago
  I doubt you’ll be able to buy working ICs to decap since they may be needed to bring a broken system back to life.
  - asciilifeform 3y ago
    I have 5 Symbolics Ivory CPUs (1 of which is in a working MacIvory III card.) Recently I found that not far from where I live, one can rent time on an electron microscope for a very reasonable price. But the lab in question does not have the gear needed for decapping and delayering. If someone knows of a reasonably-priced (mid five-figures or less) commercial facility that will do it with a good chance of success, I'd be interested. But I won't be sending these chips to some random person who may or may not be able to (or even make an honest attempt) to do the job, as I have only this small handful of units and currently no way to get more.
zaalps 3y ago
[flagged]
gjvc 3y ago
what is there that was not supplied on the CD-ROMs and tapes they sold?
rbanffy 3y ago
"Non-commercial"?! How much money are they making from it now?
effed3 3y ago
I look at the interlisp effort, being reworked.. So would be really difficult to setup a public/no-profit startup/company to bring up all the stuff, and coordinate all the people involved? maybe even a new hw can be made again.. Probably the real problems arise from different opinions between owners and former employees about the future and possibilites of the technology? But this story everytime make me think at the billions of lines of code leaved in the dark (or in the reels of 9inch tapes), representing so many years/man of work, developed and debugged, only to be forget and sometimes reinvented, some better it's progress of course, and may times only worse, reinventing the wheel every time. Even this is a form of waste/pollution?

230 points by mepian 3y ago

User23 3y ago

Is there still some kind of revenue stream from Symbolics Lisp or does the owner just want it to die with him?

solarmist 3y ago
It’s a pain to do the work associated, with no personal upside, so it’s probably neglect more than anything.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  Pain? The hardest part is probably finding a five inch floppy drive connected to a machine that can push to GitHub. Even that could be outsourced to some trusted resourceful LISP enthusiast.
  - linguae 3y ago
    There's a lot of preparatory and legal work involved in preparing a proprietary software project for release as an open source project. It's not as simple as just pushing the source tree to GitHub and calling it a day. For example, if portions of the code were licensed by other other copyright holders, permission from them is required. There are other cases where the code needs to be examined before release in order to edit or remove materials that are personally identifying, embarrassing, or could cause legal issues if publicly disclosed.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it. Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
      - lispm 3y ago
        > mystique would be lost People would also discover that the architecture is not simple, but grown over a decade while there was rapid development of the basics people take for granted: standards, languages, networking, operating systems, ... In the mid 80s TCP/IP was an expensive add on for Genera. Later it was made a part of the OS. But development stopped before it could add things like IPv6, Unicode, basic security, HTTPS, and other things. One could add it, but then one had to learn ZetaLisp (70s/80s), Flavors (early 80s), Symbolics Common Lisp (80s/90s), an object-oriented networking stack architecture from the 80s, ... You would have a second life in a technology stack somewhere between the past and the future, in a parallel world.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. Still I also think these kinds of "live editing" environments don't translate well into some modern "best practices" around version control, deployment, versioning, etc. Remembering my experience with LambdaMOO & similar and then later Smalltalk/Squeak and recently with doing stuff with Julia's REPL, etc. They're fascinating and fairly productive, but I am not convinced about this technique's ability to scale.
        lispm 3y ago
        > It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. It may not have the fancy UI, may not have a fancy user experience, may not be an operating system, may have a more primitive Lisp dialect, may not have a good multi-threading story, ... but it might exist and people put a lot of work into it: GNU Emacs and its extensions. That's how it is...
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I think half the magic I associate with the Symbolics products is that they also made their own hardware, custom built for Lisp. Which is kinda neat and magical, if entirely impractical. That plus the lovely keyboards, nice case design, etc. etc.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  Please. Dude could day “hey I want to open source this, someone do the work for me and show me where to sign” and people would trip over themselves rushing to make it happen.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Yeah, my thoughts precisely. Genera is obsolete. I cannot imagine what possible profit could be made. There may be value in the design that could be of benefit even today, but I cannot understand people who hoard old IP.
- the-smug-one 3y ago
  My guess is that there are maintenance contracts which can be quite lucrative.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Still? That would surprise me.
    - lallysingh 3y ago
      Someone's in a pickle if they need support. The older the contract, the more it's probably worth.
nabla9 3y ago
In 2021 there was port to Apple M1 MacOS, so it seems like there can be small revenue streams still. Open Portable Genrea runs on 64-bit x86 and Arm.
- lispm 3y ago
  Gary Palter has made it work both on Linux and macOS, both x86-64 and ARM64. He also brought the original Open Genera for DEC Alpha to the same software level.

linguae 3y ago

This would be a major development should this come to pass. Even if Genera doesn’t get released under a OSS-compliant license, this will be beneficial for hobbyists and historians (though I don’t know how restrictive non-commercial licenses are for people in academia), similar to the recent release of the Apple Lisa source code (which has similar stipulations). I’ve always wanted to use Symbolics Genera, but I was born around the time of the AI winter of the late 1980s. I wonder if there were any efforts in the 1990s or 2000s to create a FOSS clone of Genera in the vein of either the GNU project, the Linux kernel, and 4.4BSD and its descendants. I heard that Genera is quite complex, but complexity didn’t stop ReactOS and Haiku from chugging along after all these years.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
You'd hope that that these folks could at least do a GPL-style/copyleft license, which would effectively prevent (non-negotiated) commercial use anyways, while still enabling the open source community to enhance and distribute?
- racingmars 3y ago
  The GPL does not prohibit commercial use at all. Often when historical stuff like this is released for "non-commercial use", they're not just talking about not using the code itself in your own non-open-source product, but they mean "you can't run your business on this software." The GPL certainly doesn't stop a commercial entity from downloading and using a GPL-licensed accounting package such a GnuCash to keep track of their company finances.
  - jasonjayr 3y ago
    Having never used a lisp machine, and only having a basic understanding of it -- but if the whole system is a lisp image + apps are just calling into the OS as if they were lisp functions, woulden't a 'pure GPL' be problematic becuase EVERYTHING running in it would have to be GPL? Are there clear linking boundaries in symbolics lisp between apps + the OS ?

pdw 3y ago

Don't hold your breath, these rumors have been going for well over a decade: 2018: "The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330 2014: "The problem is that the Symbolics IP is now owned by John Mallery; he has stated he has plans for making it available but so far (several years) has not yet done so." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034 The software itself can easily be found these days, if you're interested for hobbyist reasons.

mepian 3y ago
This is more than a rumor: Gary Palter is one of the last employees of Symbolics who wrote the emulator in the first place, and he communicated with the owner. He co-authored this article about the development of the emulator: http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html The fact that he still has hope is significant.
- appleflaxen 3y ago
  Is he the copyright holder? Being the last employee doesn't have anything to do with copyright, if you're an employee of a company.
  - skissane 3y ago
    The company (Symbolics) was owned by Andrew Topping. Topping died, and Symbolics' IP was sold at his deceased estate auction. It was bought by John C. Mallery, a (former?) MIT professor, so he is the current copyright holder. (Or at least he asserts he is–some have expressed doubts over the legitimacy of the transaction, but the only way to get a definitive answer to that would be through a lawsuit, and nobody thus far has wanted to go down that path–the risks are that one might spend a fortune on lawyers and Mallery could win.) Gary Palter was one of the last employees, and as such doesn't own the copyrights. However, he is in personal contact with Mallery, and the enhancements he has made to Genera (such as porting it to ARM) have been done with Mallery's permission. Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Palter has never clearly explained it, although I imagine he doesn't want to burn his bridges with Mallery, and that may limit what he's able to publicly say.

behnamoh 3y ago

I just don’t know why much of the Lisp ecosystem is closed/commercial, like if you wanna do Common lisp you have to pay for Lisp Works. Could it be one reason for Lisp’s low popularity? If I want to pick up Python now, there’s amazing free tooling for it. If I want to pick up Common lisp, well …

Jach 3y ago
Just use SBCL - https://www.sbcl.org/ https://www.sbcl.org/ Pick an editor: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Good enough for games (and other commercial offerings) - https://kandria.com/ https://kandria.com/
- mepian 3y ago
  It's definitely good enough for Google: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-common-lisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-comm...
  - dietrichepp 3y ago
    ITA software is an acquisition, and I’m sure most of the Lisp development at Google is just done by engineers tweaking their .emacs files. The problem of parsing data from airlines is fiendishly hard. There are a ton of different rules for how to calculate prices, and all sorts of deals and promotions that may affect a particular route on a particular day. If you have a system which can parse this data, then you wouldn’t want to rewrite it. I’ve read a number of articles about ITA Software’s Lisp code and it’s really interesting. Lisp may be a critical part of ITA’s success, but “good enough for Google” is probably the wrong take here—Google, I’m sure, purchased a company to add its working product to their portfolio. I doubt that Google’s processes would allow someone to ale a new product in Lisp.
    - mepian 3y ago
      I meant SBCL specifically, not Common Lisp in general. They could have been using LispWorks or Allegro CL instead, but they aren't.

dumdumchan 3y ago

Just a virtual machine that runs a lisp os. Might as well just run clojure on jvm

linguae 3y ago
What makes Symbolics Genera interesting is not the fact it’s a Common Lisp implementation; there’s SBCL, ABCL, and plenty of others. It’s the development environment inside Genera that many users fondly remember and make it stand out even today. The excitement about the broader availability of Genera centers around its development environment.
shrubble 3y ago
Even the device drivers were written in Lisp.

LispSporks22 3y ago

Maybe we can save up and buy it from this dude, then open it something like what happened with Blender? I hate the idea of hobbyist licenses - it reminds me of the torturous OpenVMS hobbyist program or whatever the hell that incomprehensible situation is. Also, curious how old is the IP owner in this situation? What happens if he croaks with it?

ndiddy 3y ago
AFAIK Symbolics is basically a one-man operation, and the owner has been unwilling to sell the rights to Genera for any price.
- i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
  i doubt he was offered >= 1 bln $. that's probably the price he's waiting for
- LispSporks22 3y ago
  Damn that’s too bad. Part of computing history and all.. wonder why he is motivated that way
  - mepian 3y ago
    Maybe he's still hoping to use it to implement his "wish": http://web.archive.org/web/20011107164802/www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/jcma.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011107164802/www.ai.mit.edu/peo... "Wish List: a knowledge-based operating system running on a MIMD parallel machine. The system should exceed the productivity of the Lisp Machine by several orders of magnitude and integrate seamlessly with a global knowledge base and with a global computational environment." Looks like he recently registered a new company: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nh/872107 https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nh/872107
- Keyframe 3y ago
  Does he actually have any connection to Genera or even Symbolics?

johndmcmaster 3y ago

Some friends and I tried to buy chips from them recently. However, they wanted a relatively significant amount of money for them that more accurately reflected commercial rates than historical collectible prices. Seems like they are operating as a corporation still and may still be protective over their IP Background: I maintain the largest die photography collection on the internet. I wanted to take some die pictures for historical reasons. Fortunately I was able to get one to image from a third party, although I haven't posted it yet

lispm 3y ago
I would think that in the few remaining CPUs specially designed to run Lisp have a significant historical value. Just having a working original Lisp Machine is extremely rare these days - given that there were probably only 10000 ever being made and the older ones (from the early to mid 80s) are extremely fragile.
- eschaton 3y ago
  They’re not that fragile.
eschaton 3y ago
I doubt you’ll be able to buy working ICs to decap since they may be needed to bring a broken system back to life.
- asciilifeform 3y ago
  I have 5 Symbolics Ivory CPUs (1 of which is in a working MacIvory III card.) Recently I found that not far from where I live, one can rent time on an electron microscope for a very reasonable price. But the lab in question does not have the gear needed for decapping and delayering. If someone knows of a reasonably-priced (mid five-figures or less) commercial facility that will do it with a good chance of success, I'd be interested. But I won't be sending these chips to some random person who may or may not be able to (or even make an honest attempt) to do the job, as I have only this small handful of units and currently no way to get more.

zaalps 3y ago

[flagged]

gjvc 3y ago

what is there that was not supplied on the CD-ROMs and tapes they sold?

rbanffy 3y ago

"Non-commercial"?! How much money are they making from it now?

effed3 3y ago

I look at the interlisp effort, being reworked.. So would be really difficult to setup a public/no-profit startup/company to bring up all the stuff, and coordinate all the people involved? maybe even a new hw can be made again.. Probably the real problems arise from different opinions between owners and former employees about the future and possibilites of the technology? But this story everytime make me think at the billions of lines of code leaved in the dark (or in the reels of 9inch tapes), representing so many years/man of work, developed and debugged, only to be forget and sometimes reinvented, some better it's progress of course, and may times only worse, reinventing the wheel every time. Even this is a form of waste/pollution?