Symbolics

» see symbolics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 9 august 1995 a bankruptcy court in Massachusetts closed the sale of everything Symbolics owned. The price, after adjustments, came to $535,215.75. Fifteen years earlier the company had walked out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to build a computer that ran Lisp natively, and at the top of the market one of those computers listed for around a hundred thousand dollars. The whole company went for the price of a handful of them.

The first product, the LM-2, shipped in 1981 as a repackaged version of the CADR design MIT had already built. The 3600 family arrived in 1983 and was the real thing. A 36 bit word carried tag bits alongside the data, and the stack machine instruction set had hardware support for garbage collection sitting underneath it. Over half a million lines of Lisp ran the whole computer from the microcode upward. The operating system got the name Genera around 1984. People who used one never got over it, and the reason was structural rather than sentimental. The editor and the debugger were not separate programs launched at each other. They were parts of one live image you could halt anywhere and inspect all the way down.

What killed it came from two directions at once. The commercial AI boom of the mid eighties collapsed into the AI winter, and the Reagan administration's missile defense program slowed down, which mattered because DARPA had been pouring money into AI on its behalf. Underneath that, ordinary microprocessors got fast enough and Lisp compilers got good enough that a purpose built Lisp machine no longer bought you anything you could not get from a workstation costing a tenth as much. Management added its own contribution: a war between Russell Noftsker and the CEO the board hired in 1986 over whether the future was hardware or software, ending with both of them fired, plus long term California real estate leases signed during the good years.

Lisp arrived in my life the way it arrives in most people's, as something you install on top of an operating system that speaks something else, usually for one course or one weekend of curiosity. For the customers of this company, Lisp was not a language running on a computer. It was the computer. There was no layer underneath it negotiating with anything, and no point at which you dropped out of it into C. That is a way of building a machine nobody has attempted seriously since, and it lost to hardware that was worse at almost everything except the price.

~ the dossier ~

~ the machine ~

The 3600 was about the size of a household refrigerator, partly because the processor boards were spaced wide enough to accept wire wrap prototypes and partly because the smallest disk that could hold the software was fourteen inches across. Clock speed hovered around 5 MHz and varied by instruction, since many Lisp primitives executed in a single cycle. A 68000 sat in the corner as a front end processor, booting the real machine and handling the slow peripherals.

Later came the Ivory, a single chip Lisp processor with 390,000 transistors, addressing 40 bit words. It went into standalone machines and into cards that plugged into a Macintosh or a Sun, which is how most people who used one in the nineties actually met it. Eventually the Ivory instruction set was emulated in software on DEC Alpha and sold as Open Genera, a Lisp machine with no Lisp machine left in it.

~ the fight that made gnu ~

Until 1981 Symbolics shared its changes to the Lisp Machine system software back to MIT, where its competitor Lisp Machines, Inc. could pick them up. Then it stopped and kept its own copy on its own servers. By Richard Stallman's account it did that specifically to starve LMI, which did not have the staff to maintain the operating system alone. Symbolics saw it as a company finally controlling its own product.

Both readings can be true and the outcome was the same either way. The open collaboration at the MIT AI Lab ended, and Stallman started the GNU project as a deliberate answer to it. Copyleft came out of that answer. A company selling six figure workstations to defense contractors is the reason the free software movement has a founding grievance with a date on it.

~ the actual end ~

Symbolics filed for Chapter 11 on 27 january 1993 in the District of Massachusetts. It ran as a debtor in possession for two and a half years while the court looked for a buyer, and on 9 august 1995 the sale of substantially all assets to Princeton Capital Finance closed. The case was dismissed on 7 may 1996 rather than converted to Chapter 7, on the finding that dismissal was the cleaner end.

A privately held company of the same name has held the software since, selling Open Genera and service contracts to whoever still had a machine. Its maintenance facility in Chatsworth closed in july 2005 and its reclusive owner died the same year. The Department of Defense gave it a five year maintenance contract in 2011 that ran out in september 2016. There has not been much sign of it since.

~ the first.com ~

symbolics.com was registered on 15 march 1985, the first commercial domain name on the internet. At the time it was a piece of administrative housekeeping rather than an asset, because there were a few hundred hosts that cared and no market for a name. The company that registered it went through bankruptcy without anybody thinking to value it.

It was sold in august 2009 to a domain investment company, which is a fair summary of what happened to the internet between those two dates. The Lisp machines are in museums and the domain is in a portfolio.

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