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Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long. They showed signs that some people there understood that their developme
by eschaton 11mo ago
Symbolics’ big fumble was thinking their CPU was their special sauce for way too long.
They showed signs that some people there understood that their development environment was it, but it obviously never fully got through to decision-makers: They had CLOE, a 386 PC deployment story in partnership with Gold Hill, but they’d have been far better served by acquiring Gold Hill and porting Genera to the 386 PC architecture.
- _zagj 11mo agoFor those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)
- f1shy 11mo agoWasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?
- _zagj 11mo agoI was both Alpha being quasi-open itself, like OpenPOWER today, and like earlier PDP minis had been, whereas VAX had been pretty locked down, and OpenVMS getting POSIX compatibility (admittedly probably more the latter than the former, but DEC was big on branding things "open" at the time, partly because they were losing ground): https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vmslt05a/vu/alpha_history.html https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vmslt05a/vu/alpha_hist... > Although Alpha was declared an "open architecture" right from the start, there was no consortium to develop it. All R&D actions were handled by DEC itself, and sometimes in cooperation with Mitsubishi. In fact, though the architecture was free de jure, most important hardware designs of it were pretty much closed de facto, and had to be paid-licensed (if possible at all). So, it wasn't that thing helping to promote the architecture. To mention, soon after introduction of EV4, DEC's high management offered to license manufacturing rights to Intel, Motorola, NEC, and Texas Instruments. But all these companies were involved in different projects and were of very little to no interest in EV4, so they refused. Perhaps, the conditions could be also unacceptable, or something else. Mistake #5.
- inejge 11mo ago> Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”? Networking was the initial impetus, but the phrase came to include programming interfaces, which is why POSIX was considered such a big deal. The idea was to promote interoperability and portability, as oposed to manufacturer-specific islands like those from IBM and DEC.
- pjmlp 11mo agoNo, it meant industry standards, instead of proprietary ones, that is why POSIX, Motif, and others are under The Open Group.
- larsbrinkhoff 11mo agoYes, but also. OpenGenera was ported to x86 some time ago.
- jacquesm 11mo agoTo be fair to Symbolics: a lot of companies back then thought their CPU was the secret sauce. Some still do...
- musicale 11mo agoI think Apple knows that it's the whole widget (including software and hardware) that matters.
- ndiddy 11mo agoXerox/Venue tried porting Interlisp (the Lisp machine environment developed at Xerox PARC) to both Unix workstations and commodity PC hardware, but it doesn't seem like that was a commercial success. Venue remained a tiny company providing support to existing Interlisp customers until its head developer died in the late 2000s and they wrapped up operations. The Unix/PC ports seem to have mostly been used as a way to run legacy Interlisp software on newer hardware rather than attracting anyone new to the Lisp machine world. I don't see why Symbolics doing the same thing as Xerox would have produced any different results. The real problem was that investment in expert systems/Lisp dried up as a whole. I don't know whether any of the Lisp vendors could have done anything to combat those market forces.
- bigfishrunning 11mo agoI don't really understand why lisp was so intrinsically tied to expert systems and AI. It seems to me that Scheme (and, to an extent, common lisp or other lisps) are pretty good platforms for experimenting with software ideas; long before Jupiter notebooks existed.
- eschaton 11mo agoThe environment lasted a long time as the basis for other Xerox products, such as their office automation system and as a front end for their printing systems. However, it wasn’t so much ported as the virtual machine was. (Just like Symbolics did with OpenGenera on Alpha.) What I’m suggesting is that they could have done a full port to the hardware; OpenGenera is still an Ivory CPU emulator. In 1986-7 you could get an AT-compatible 80386 system running at 16-25MHz that supported 8-32MB of RAM for 10-20% the price of a Symbolics workstation, and while it might not run Lisp quite as fast as a 3600 series system, it would still be fast enough for both deployment and development—and the next generation would run Lisp at comparable performance.
- rjsw 11mo agoI think it would have been easier to port the MIT/LMI/TI environment to standard hardware as it was still 32-bit.
- eschaton 11mo agoThere’s not a huge amount of _explicit_ dependency on the bit width of the system in either the 3600 or Ivory. Of course there’s still plenty of _implicit_ dependency in terms of hardware interaction, object layout in memory, collector implementation, etc. but that’s all stuff that had to be dealt with anyway to port from CADR to 3600 in the first place, and then again to port from 3600-series to Ivory.
- rjsw 11mo agoI was thinking that someone could have rewritten the CADR microcode to run on a 68020+Custom MMU system with no other OS, there isn't all that much of it. This would be tied to the bit width of the system.