5 ms·

I find the narrative from the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines to be really enlightening (far more so than a dry chart like TFA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li

I find the narrative from the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines to be really enlightening (far more so than a dry chart like TFA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine . In particular, I think it is much easier to understand Stallman's outlook/philosophy if you put yourself in his shoes around this time. The MIT AI Lab went from a bustle of futuristic technology to essentially a ghost town, consisting of him and Marvin Minsky, following the dual raid of LMI and Symbolics on the AI Lab staff.

fsck--off 13y ago
The Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines isn't great. Read Dan Weinreb's "Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI" [1]. Weinreb was a much more credible source than Stallman. The AI Lab hackers had free will and were not forced to go anywhere. Saying that these companies "raided" the AI Lab is, quite frankly, insulting. And Symbolics's practice of hiring the hackers full time was actually done entirely for ethical reasons. Other spinoff AI Lab companies were taking advantage of AI Lab resources, and Symbolics wanted to be sure that they didn't do that. The MIT Lisp Machine code was owned and copyrighted by MIT. When MIT licensed the code to LMI and Symbolics, they wanted to be sure that the code would not be given away for free to other companies, including companies that they had also licensed code to. Stallman essentially wanted Symbolics to give their code for free to their competitor, LMI, which would have been illegal according the licensing agreement (that MIT wrote) and would have resulted in Symbolics being shut down. By the way, the comment thread on that blog ends up being about the origin of Emacs and is quite fascinating. Stallman isn't technically the creator of Emacs (Guy Steele and David Moon are), although he did so much to improve it that he is generally given credit for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....
- gaius 13y ago
  Stallman is a prolific programmer, but ask yourself, how is he was able to out-program entire teams of his former colleagues? Answer, because the code wasn't the hard part, figuring out what to do was the hard part, and copying it once that was done was easy. The lesson which still hasn't sunk into the "free" community today is, because a thing is cheap to reproduce, doesn't mean it was cheap to do. Stallman did a massive disservice to his friends and the entire computing community. We are still paying for his sabotage today.
  - lispm 13y ago
    The real answer is that he didn't.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - pekk 13y ago
    Which was the act of sabotage?
    - gaius 13y ago
      He made their products commercially unviable. We could all be using Lisp machines now, the PC would never have happened, no DOS, no Windows, no x86, no Linux either for that matter. We would be 50 years ahead of where we are now.
      - fsck--off 13y ago
        This statement is ridiculous. Symbolics is dead for a number of reasons, but Stallman's Emacs isn't one of them. Stallman copied some of the features in Zmacs. Zmacs was one small part of a much larger operating system which, among other things, included industry leading animation software. There were many, many systems (including the hardware architecture itself) that Stallman could not, and did not copy. No company picked an alternative to Lisp Machines simply because it also had something that looked like Zmacs. Your statement is akin to saying that a modern tablet with a web browser makes desktops (which can run much more powerful tools) obsolete. Symbolics got used to selling hardware for tens of thousands of dollars and could not fully adjust when competitors were eventually able to sell machines for much less. The company also had a couple of bad CEOs, and suffered large financial losses because of a series of bad real estate deals. Efforts to port their software to other platforms were largely unsuccessful. Lisp Machines were always a niche market because they were expensive, top-of-the-line machines. The target market never really overlapped with Windows. Cheap workstations that could have multiple users eventually became almost as capable as Lisp Machines and thus displaced them. If you want to credit Stallman with sabotage then mention Elisp, because Elisp is the worst Lisp still in use (Zmacs ran ZetaLisp).
- CurtMonash 13y ago
  Of all the problems Symbolics had, LMI and Stallman weren't two of the bigger ones. Specialized development workstations just lost to more general-purpose ones that could be built and sold in much larger quantities. Rational started out making ADA development workstations; that didn't go too well either.
lispm 13y ago
The bigger picture is that the MIT AI Lab was working on projects for DARPA ( DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency ). This sponsor wanted to commercialize the research results, so that that at the next stage companies would be suppliers of AI hardware and software for the military (for space-based weapons, fighter planes, autonomous vehicles, ...). Many of the early Lisp machines were bought by Reagan's star wars program. Thus it was not LMI or Symbolics who raided some innocent lab, it was a new stage in a government directed and financed technology development program, primarily for the military.

fsck--off 13y ago

The Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines isn't great. Read Dan Weinreb's "Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI" [1]. Weinreb was a much more credible source than Stallman. The AI Lab hackers had free will and were not forced to go anywhere. Saying that these companies "raided" the AI Lab is, quite frankly, insulting. And Symbolics's practice of hiring the hackers full time was actually done entirely for ethical reasons. Other spinoff AI Lab companies were taking advantage of AI Lab resources, and Symbolics wanted to be sure that they didn't do that. The MIT Lisp Machine code was owned and copyrighted by MIT. When MIT licensed the code to LMI and Symbolics, they wanted to be sure that the code would not be given away for free to other companies, including companies that they had also licensed code to. Stallman essentially wanted Symbolics to give their code for free to their competitor, LMI, which would have been illegal according the licensing agreement (that MIT wrote) and would have resulted in Symbolics being shut down. By the way, the comment thread on that blog ends up being about the origin of Emacs and is quite fascinating. Stallman isn't technically the creator of Emacs (Guy Steele and David Moon are), although he did so much to improve it that he is generally given credit for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....

gaius 13y ago
Stallman is a prolific programmer, but ask yourself, how is he was able to out-program entire teams of his former colleagues? Answer, because the code wasn't the hard part, figuring out what to do was the hard part, and copying it once that was done was easy. The lesson which still hasn't sunk into the "free" community today is, because a thing is cheap to reproduce, doesn't mean it was cheap to do. Stallman did a massive disservice to his friends and the entire computing community. We are still paying for his sabotage today.
- lispm 13y ago
  The real answer is that he didn't.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pekk 13y ago
  Which was the act of sabotage?
  - gaius 13y ago
    He made their products commercially unviable. We could all be using Lisp machines now, the PC would never have happened, no DOS, no Windows, no x86, no Linux either for that matter. We would be 50 years ahead of where we are now.
    - fsck--off 13y ago
      This statement is ridiculous. Symbolics is dead for a number of reasons, but Stallman's Emacs isn't one of them. Stallman copied some of the features in Zmacs. Zmacs was one small part of a much larger operating system which, among other things, included industry leading animation software. There were many, many systems (including the hardware architecture itself) that Stallman could not, and did not copy. No company picked an alternative to Lisp Machines simply because it also had something that looked like Zmacs. Your statement is akin to saying that a modern tablet with a web browser makes desktops (which can run much more powerful tools) obsolete. Symbolics got used to selling hardware for tens of thousands of dollars and could not fully adjust when competitors were eventually able to sell machines for much less. The company also had a couple of bad CEOs, and suffered large financial losses because of a series of bad real estate deals. Efforts to port their software to other platforms were largely unsuccessful. Lisp Machines were always a niche market because they were expensive, top-of-the-line machines. The target market never really overlapped with Windows. Cheap workstations that could have multiple users eventually became almost as capable as Lisp Machines and thus displaced them. If you want to credit Stallman with sabotage then mention Elisp, because Elisp is the worst Lisp still in use (Zmacs ran ZetaLisp).
CurtMonash 13y ago
Of all the problems Symbolics had, LMI and Stallman weren't two of the bigger ones. Specialized development workstations just lost to more general-purpose ones that could be built and sold in much larger quantities. Rational started out making ADA development workstations; that didn't go too well either.

lispm 13y ago

The bigger picture is that the MIT AI Lab was working on projects for DARPA ( DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency ). This sponsor wanted to commercialize the research results, so that that at the next stage companies would be suppliers of AI hardware and software for the military (for space-based weapons, fighter planes, autonomous vehicles, ...). Many of the early Lisp machines were bought by Reagan's star wars program. Thus it was not LMI or Symbolics who raided some innocent lab, it was a new stage in a government directed and financed technology development program, primarily for the military.