Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)

http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-symbolics-fail/

by pjmlp • 12 years ago

78 61 12 years ago

For those that had no idea what the hell symbolics are/is (As I did) I think it is referring to the company: http://smbx.org/ has info

herokusaki• 12 years ago

It's sad what's become of http://symbolics.com/. I thought it would go to some Lisp-related project eventually.

nathell2• 12 years ago

The dates on Dan Weinreb's blog are all wrong for some reason. This post likely dates back to 2011 or before. (EDIT: Ah, corrected by the moderators, thanks.)

I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at ECLM 2008, four years before his death. He was hacking away on his XO-1 and showing around fancy things. A very memorable man. He's missed.

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

Thanks, I searched for him but wasn't sure if it was the same Dan Weinreb, given the dates on the web site.

CurtMonash2• 12 years ago

His blog seems to have JUST been rehosted by somebody. I got pingbacks on DBMS2 from it, with the new post dates, yesterday. It also looks quite different than it did before.

I miss Dan. One of the nicest guys in the industry.

notacoward• 12 years ago

I met Dan only once, despite working in some similar areas and living in the same town. I wish I'd had the chance to spend more time with him. He was very bright, very energetic, and very friendly. Mutual friends have said he was like that most of the time. He just wanted to understand stuff, and thought I could help (I'm the author of a blog post he says inspired this one), so he simply reached out and made a new friend. What a great hacker.

avodonosov• 12 years ago

Corrected by moderators? How corrected? The dates are still wrong

nathell2• 12 years ago

The original title didn't mention the date at all.

mjn• 12 years ago

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), the PaintAmation package (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4), and the first HDTV processing on a workstation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppVP8PiZag).

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Sorry for the small plug: I gathered some videos and links about S-Graphics offsprings, mostly Mirai, done at Nichimen in http://www.reddit.com/r/nichimen

Some of these videos are already in, but if anyone has other articles or papers about anything S-Graphics/Mirai, like news about the izware guys, feel free to post.

ps: in case the subreddit is locked, I'll take links here.

dschiptsov6• 12 years ago

Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well".

Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".

yuhong• 12 years ago

What is also funny is that there was also the JavaStation which was once going to use special Java CPUs.

dschiptsov6• 12 years ago

Do google for "Jazelle".)

brazzy2• 12 years ago

No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems. It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.

dschiptsov6• 12 years ago

Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems.

For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality, go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open Genera 2.0, the whole OS, which was available of dynamic modification and extension by the programmer, which could be found in a torrent search, and then go to the rosettacode website and look at every single page too see what a fucking crap is the language you are using to get shit done in exchange for a paycheck. It is worst in any possible way - verbosity, clumsiness, clutter, cryptic syntax, you name it.

This is actually not interesting notion. Everyone with a bit of brains could visit rosettacode. The interesting questions are why it is so that the world is dominated by Java.

Pages and pages were written about what's wrong with Java and why it is so popular. One sentence summary could go like this "a sandbox for crowds of packers to get shit done, agressively marketed to them via "you don't have to understand" memes by corporations to make big money". It spread like a virus due to bandwagon and peer effects and catchy memes like "write once" or "millions of man hours".

Ok, use it, enjoy yourself, but, please, do not touch so rare and really wonderful things which you unable to comprehend.

arethuza• 12 years ago

I think that's a bit harsh - I actually moved from mostly doing Common Lisp development (on DEC Alpha workstations) to Java development in early '95 and I really liked Java back then - I was as passionate about it as people are today about Go/CoffeeScript/Haskell. Java, at least at the start, really was something fresh and good.

Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful software eventually?

zeckalpha• 12 years ago

That's why "Haskell avoids success at all costs".

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

Same here, I remember how fresh it felt by bringing GC to the masses and providing a more consistent experience across platforms than C or C++ were capable of, with their compiler specific behaviours, extensions and catching up with the ongoing standardization efforts.

nabla9• 12 years ago

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author

CurtMonash2• 12 years ago

Dan was the guy at Symbolics most commonly tasked with making me believe Symbolics would succeed. He succeeded at the task. I forgave him.

tsmith54322• 12 years ago

I worked in an expert systems company in the 80s (one mentioned in the Phillips thesis referenced in the danweinreb article). Take all this with a dose of IIRC.

As part of out work, we evaluated and benchmarked Xerox Interlisp machines, Symbolics systems, VAXen, later Gold Hill etc. to find a cost-effective delivery platform. We even eventually funded the development of a delivery-focused subset of Common Lisp.

One aspect that Symbolics didn't seem to understand back then was cost of entry and deployment: the Xerox D-machines were (IIRC) around 1/3 the cost of the Symbolics. Perhaps not as speedy, but adequate for our day-to-day development work as well as for the end customer's needs.

Symbolics had great development systems, but the delivery answers were late in coming; too late to help us.

There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations, but the margins here are too small to contain it....

rjsw• 12 years ago

Your memory of the costs of the systems is fine.

I couldn't afford a Lisp Machine, I just used Franz Lisp on an Atari ST.

qohen• 12 years ago

There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations

On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2].

(Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environment is covered in the "Into the Ground: C++" chapter).

There's some interesting history there (and the rest of the book is probably worth reading as well for a variety of reasons).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel

[2] http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf

lispm2• 12 years ago

Lucid CL was a very nice implementation. Maintenance is still available for it. It's now called Liquid CL and maintenance comes from the LispWorks guys.

Lucid took the money they earned and invested it into some ill-fated and ill-designed C++ environment. Lisp competitors from that time, Franz Inc. and LispWorks are still in business.

jff• 12 years ago

You did benchmarking so you may be able to confirm/deny this: I've heard that Lisp machines went out of favor because Lisp just ran faster on a VAX. Was this the case?

hga3• 12 years ago

Besides horrible management---echoing Zigurd, a friend and contemporary, I was at one point reliably told that manufacturing, R&D and marketing were paying no attention to each other, such that manufacturing had built a factory that couldn't make the latest hardware R&D had developed, which was done completely independently of what marketing thought was needed---they were killed by non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs.

Basically they couldn't amortize the NRE for their custom hardware and later most especially chips (from memory, first, a chipset that spread the CPU across several chips, rather like the one Western Digital did that among other things enabled the LSI-11, then of course an all in one chip) across the huge number of units that Intel and Motorola sold. They also canceled their RISC rethink of their basic low level architecture on the day it was supposed to tape out; don't know if it had a low enough gate count to be like the first SPARC processor, which was implemented on 2 20,000 gate arrays, one for the CPU and one for the floating point unit (gate arrays are all alike until a few layers of metal are put on top).

So soon enough you could run a full Common Lisp, almost certainly without as much run-time error checking, faster on cheap commodity hardware than on a Lisp Machine.

Something like that seems to have happened to Azul Systems, which apparently isn't developing any new hardware, but is selling their version of the HotSpot JVM to run on x86_64 hardware. A prior generation of their pauseless GC (vs. 1 second per GiB, a big deal if your heap is 100s of GiB) required a software write or read barrier that cost ~20% of performance (all this from memory). It's likely that soon enough, even if it perhaps ran slower than their custom hardware, it was a lot cheaper to run it on commodity Intel/AMD hardware.

tsmith54322• 12 years ago

I don't have any of the old papers / results. But my recollection is that the Lisp workstations greatly outperformed LISP on a contemporary VAX for a given cost, in part because of the workstation's microcoded instruction set tailored to Lisp. Over time, though, commodity hardware increased significantly in relative performance simply due to the economies of scale in producing it.

You might've been able to buy a Xerox workstation for, say, $15K-$20K, while a VAX box was over $100K. BUT for a production system, the VAX could run multiple Lisp processes at the same time. (I'm guessing at costs here, it's been too long.)

Also, Richard Gabriel did a bunch of Common Lisp benchmarks, might help to look for them. (Great fellow.)

The real threat to Symbolics et al, circa 1987, was things like Gold Hill Common Lisp running on, say, a IBM PC/AT with a 286 chip and maybe a meg of memory. At, perhaps, $3,000. It ran pretty fast, the Gold Hill tech folks were very good. But GHCL had an unsophisticated development environment compared to Symbolics / Xerox.

As excellent as the workstation environments were for development, a market demands that you eventually deliver a cost effective product into customers' hands. (Or is that too much old-think?)

cafard• 12 years ago

I highly recommend the book Patterns of Software for which the link is given here. It includes the story of Lucid's troubles, which were similar to Symbolic's, though Lucid was not in the hardware business. Quite apart from that, it is well worth reading.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

I knew several of the Symbolics founding group, especially the engineers, but several of the management team as well. The tl;dr in the article comes here:

Meanwhile, back at Symbolics, there were huge internal management conflicts, leading to the resignation of much of top management, who were replaced by the board of directors with new CEO’s who did not do a good job, and did not have the vision to see what was happening.

Symbolics was supposed to be the consensus Next Big Thing. A rival to Sun. A gravy train.

There were titanic egos and divas among the engineers, too. A physical expression of which here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard But several of them are also remembered for big contributions to the industry.

mzs• 12 years ago

Regarding the graphics, the whole lisp thing did not take off is what I think happened. When Symbolics began there was a lot of excitement - them, MIT, LMI, Xerox, even VAX early on. But it did not really catch-on, some of that was because of fighting about the code between Symbolics, MIT, and LMI that held it back. So when Symbolics had good stuff, it was pretty much just them at that point cause they had won the fights and unix vendors were coming along.

So for their price you could get a few Sun boxes say, and you could have a few users on it. Genera was terrible about that. You could only have one user logged in at a time and that guy could change anything in the OS or programs however he felt, and then the next guy has no idea why everything is different.

Basically the graphics stuff was for effects and animation, and that did well for a while, but it was so alien to what everyone else was doing at that point, no other vendors could really make sofware easily portable between Genera and other hardware/OSes. So they did not and the S- software was really expensive route, it made the most sense to run it on VMs in OSF/1 of all things!

The other angle they could have exploited was CAD, but again Genera was the thorn. There was no way a Pro/E or anything of that sort would make it. The C on Symbolics was some strange half dynamic thing with GC implemented in lisp. Again just so alien. Essentially Dassault made a CAD (ICAD?) for it and that was it. But it was sort of ahead of it's time (there are now add-ons to all the CAD software that do similar approach, but back then it was so much like simply drafting on a computer what all the software was doing) and viewed as odd. Again very expensive and with all single user drawbacks, for example AutoCAD on PC and Pro/E on Sun were so much more appealing. And again the whole lisp thing because it was abandoned made it so that even Dassault could never really port it to modern hardware and it was a big expensive golden goose so they tried but eventually killed it and created/bought other products.

Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)

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