> In the 1980s I felt like I was all alone sometimes developing on my Lisp Machine - I often would write utilities that I wished I didn’t have to write myself.

> In the 1980s I felt like I was all alone sometimes developing on my Lisp Machine - I often would write utilities that I wished I didn’t have to write myself. The early .com companies on the Internet were all deeply involved in Lisp/AI companies: Symbolics, BBN, Thinking Machines, MCC, Xerox, SRI, ...). Plus a bunch of universities (MIT had hundreds of networked machines running some Lisp, including Lisp Machines). Many of the R&D groups were on the Internet. Larger amounts of code were for example shared via tape. For example the Symbolics User Group already shared code. The CMU CL wrote their Lisp implementation as public domain and shared all their implementation code: Lisp, editor, UI, ... Lots of old code from that time is all collected in the CMU AI Archive, which was established early 90s: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/0.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/0.html At that time a lot of new stuff was developed, like CLX, the X11 interface for Common Lisp. Every Lisper on X11 was using it. TI developed CLUE and CLIO on top of CLX. LispWorks developed their gui toolkit on top of CLUE and CLX. Sure, there were lone developers but Lisp in the 80s was widely used in universities and R&D. All were networked. MCC had 200 Lisp Machines in their network, IIRC. MIT more. SRI similar. Xerox. BBN even developed their own Lisp OS + machine. Symbolics had support for DECNET, TCP/IP, IBM Mainframes, ... The Common Lisp standard, developed in the 1980s was probably the first developed with heavy e-mail support. There was a lot of stuff shared.