Good article I hadn't run across before; thanks for linking it. One interesting side story is the odd Symbolics foray into animation and video through the Symb

Good article I hadn't run across before; thanks for linking it. One interesting side story is the odd Symbolics foray into animation and video through the Symbolics Graphics Division, which afaict was reasonably successful for a few years. It seemed like the sort of application-oriented business that might let the Symbolics machines break out of single-purpose "AI machines" into being seen as general workstations, or at least dual-purpose AI/graphics workstations. But that business seems to have sort of evaporated along with the rest of their business, despite not being AI and there being no "graphics winter". Perhaps steamrollered by Silicon Graphics, and the same trends towards Unix and commodity CPUs? Or not marketed well enough, by a company whose public materials focused too exclusively on Lisp+AI? Some bits from that era: the S-Package 3d modeling/animation system (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU), the PaintAmation package (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4), and the first HDTV processing on a workstation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppVP8PiZag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppVP8PiZag).