- Symbolics
Symbolics is a privately held company that acquired the assets of the now-defunct
computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc. and continues to sell and maintain theOpen Genera Lisp system and theMacsyma computer algebra system .History
Symbolics, Inc. [ Incorporated April 9, 1980 in Delaware by Robert P. Adams, President; Russell Noftsker, Secretary, and
Andrew Egendorf , attorney. ] was acomputer manufacturer headquartered inCambridge, Massachusetts and later inConcord, Massachusetts , with manufacturing facilities inChatsworth, California (a suburb of Los Angeles). Its first CEO, chairman, and founder wasRussell Noftsker [ Noftsker took over as President one year after incorporation. ] . Symbolics designed and manufactured a line ofLisp machine s, single-user computers optimized to run theLisp programming language . Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera forTru64 UNIX on the HP Alpha. The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available "workstation" (although that word had not yet been coined).Back in 1985, the company contracted for the communications services of Tom Kiely's Business to Business Group of the BBDO Advertising Agency, based at 383-385 Madison Avenue in New York CityFact|date=March 2008.
Symbolics was a spinoff from the
MIT AI Lab , one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines. The other wasLisp Machines, Inc. , although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2, was a repackaged version of the
MIT CADR Lisp machine design. Theoperating system and software development environment, over 500,000 lines, was written in Lisp from the microcode up, based on MIT'sLisp Machine Lisp .The software bundle was later renamed
ZetaLisp , to distinguish the Symbolics' product from other vendors who had also licensed the MIT software. Symbolics'Zmacs text editor, a variant ofEmacs , was implemented in a text-processing package named "ZWEI", an acronym for "Zwei was Eine initially" — "Eine" being an acronym for "Eine Is Not Emacs" (bothrecursive acronym s and puns on the German words for "One" ("Eins", "Eine") and "Two" ("Zwei")).The Lisp Machine system software was then copyrighted by MIT, and was licensed to Symbolics. Until 1981, they shared all the source code with MIT and kept it on an MIT server. According to a Symbolics employee, the reason for the change in policy was
Richard Stallman 's making changes with which they disagreed, such as removing Symbolics' copyright notices on Symbolics' produced enhancements and transferring the resulting enhancements to the other commercial licensees, and at one point leaving the software in a state where it would not compile. Richard Stallman's account claims Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to it, and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment. [http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html]Symbolics felt that they no longer had sufficient control over their product. At that point, Symbolics began using their own copy of the software, located on their company servers — while Stallman says that Symbolics did that to prevent its Lisp improvements from flowing to Lisp Machines, Inc. From that base, Symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software, and continued to deliver almost all the source code to their customers (including MIT). However, the policy prohibited MIT staff from distributing the Symbolics version of the software to others. With the end of open collaboration came the end of the MIT hacker community. As a reaction to this, Stallman initiated the
GNU project to make a new community. Stallman may have been aided in this decision by having been removed from the AI Lab for Copyright law violations. Eventually,Copyleft and theGNU General Public License would ensure that a hacker's software could remainfree software . In this way Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating thefree software movement .The 3600 Series
In 1983, a year after they were intended, Symbolics introduced the 3600 family of Lisp machines. Code-named the "L-machine" internally, the 3600 family was an innovative new design, inspired by the CADR architecture but sharing few of its implementation details. The main processor had a 36
bit word (divided up as 4 or 8 bits of tags, and 32 bits of data or 28 bits of memory address). Memory words were 44 bits, the additional 8 bits being used forerror-correcting code (ECC). Theinstruction set was that of astack machine . The 3600 architecture provided 4,096 hardware registers, of which half were used as a cache for the top of thecontrol stack ; the rest were used by the microcode and time-critical routines of theoperating system and Lisp run-time environment. Hardware support was provided forvirtual memory , which was common for machines in its class, and for garbage collection, which was unique.The original 3600 processor was a
microprogram med design like the CADR, and was built on several large circuit boards from standard TTLintegrated circuit s, both features being common for commercial computers in its class at the time. CPUclock speed varied depending on the particular instruction being executed, but was typically around 5 MHz. Many Lisp primitives could be executed in a singleclock cycle . Disk I/O was handled by multitasking at the microcode level. A 68000 processor (known as the "Front-End Processor", or FEP) started the main computer up, and handled the slower peripherals during normal operation. AnEthernet interface was standard equipment, replacing theChaosnet interface of the LM-2.The 3600 was roughly the size of a household refrigerator. This was partly due to the size of the processor - the cards were widely spaced to allow
wire-wrap prototype cards to fit without interference - and partly due to the limitations of the disk drive technology in the early 1980s. At the 3600's introduction, the smallest disk drive that could support theZetaLisp software was 14inch es (356 mm) across (most 3600s shipped with theFujitsu Eagle ). The 3670 and 3675 were slightly shorter in height, but were essentially the same machine packed a little tighter. The advent of 8 inch (203 mm), and later 5¼ inch (133 mm), disk drives that could hold hundreds ofmegabyte s led to the introduction of the 3640 and 3645, which were roughly the size of a two-drawer file cabinet.Later versions of the 3600 architecture were implemented on custom integrated circuits, reducing the 5 cards of the original processor design to 2, at a large manufacturing cost savings but with performance slightly better than the old design. The 3650, first of the "G machines" (as they were known within the company), was housed in a cabinet derived from the 3640s. Denser memory and smaller disk drives enabled the introduction of the 3620, about the size of a modern full-size tower PC. The 3630 was a "fat 3620" with room for more memory and video interface cards. The 3610 was a lower priced variant of the 3620, essentially identical in every way except that it was licensed for application deployment rather than general development.
The various models of the 3600 family were popular for AI research and commercial applications throughout the 1980s. The AI commercialization boom of the 1980s led directly to Symbolics' success during the decade. Symbolics computers were widely believed to be the best platform available for developing AI software.
Also contributing to the 3600 series' success was a line of
bit-mapped graphics color video interfaces, combined with extremely powerful animation software. Symbolics' Graphics Division, headquartered in Westwood, California, a stone's throw from the major Hollywood movie and TV studios, made its S-Render and S-Paint software into industry leaders in the animation business.As well, Symbolics developed the first workstations capable of processing HDTV quality video, which enjoyed a popular following in Japan. A 3600 — with the standard black-and-white monitor — made a cameo appearance in the movie
Real Genius . Symbolics' Graphics Division was sold toNichimen Trading Company in the early 90s, and the S-Graphics software ported to Franz Allegro Common Lisp on SGI and PC computers runningWindows NT . Today it is sold as Mirai by Izware LLC, and continues to be used in major motion pictures (most famously in New Line Cinema's "Lord of the Rings"), video games, and military simulations.Symbolic's 3600 series computers were also used as the first front end "controller" computers for the
Connection Machine massively parallel computers manufactured byThinking Machines Inc. , another MIT spinoff based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Connection Machine ran a parallel variant of Lisp and, initially, was used primarily by the AI community, so the Symbolics Lisp machine was a particularly good fit as a front-end machine.For a long time, the operating system didn't have a name, but was finally named "Genera" around 1984. The system included a number of advanced dialects of Lisp. Its heritage was MACLISP on the PDP-10, but it included more data types, and multiple-inheritance object-oriented programming features.
Initially called
Lisp Machine Lisp , thenZetaLisp , it finally acquired the name "Symbolics Common Lisp" during the creation ofCommon Lisp in 1987. Common Lisp is a subset of the dialect available on the Lisp Machine.Ivory and Open Genera
In the late 1980s (2 years later than planned), the Ivory family of single-chip Lisp Machine processors superseded the G-Machine 3650, 3620, and 3630 systems. The Ivory 390k transistor VLSI implementation designed in Symbolics Common Lisp using NS, a custom Symbolics Hardware Design Language (HDL), addressed a 40-bit word (8 bits tag, 32 bits data/address). Since it only addressed full words and not bytes or half-words, this allowed addressing of 4
Gigaword s (GW) or 16gigabyte s (GB) of memory; the increase inaddress space reflected the growth of programs and data as semiconductor memory and disk space became cheaper. The Ivory processor had 8 bits of ECC attached to each word, so each word fetched from external memory to the chip was actually 48 bits wide. Each Ivory instruction was 18 bits wide and two instructions plus a 2-bit CDR code and 2-bit Data Type were in each instruction word fetched from memory. Fetching two instruction words at a time from memory enhanced the Ivory's performance. Unlike the 3600'smicroprogram med architecture, the Ivory instruction set was still microcoded, but was stored in a 1200 x 180 bit ROM inside the Ivory chip. The initial Ivory processors were fabricated by VLSI Technology Inc in San Jose, California on a 2 µm CMOS process, with later generations fabricated byHewlett Packard in Corvalis, Oregon on a 1.25 µm and 1 µm CMOS processes. The Ivory had a stack architecture and operated a 4 stage pipeline: Fetch, Decode, Execute and Write Back. Ivory processors were marketed in stand-alone Lisp Machines (the XL400, XL1200, and XL1201), headless Lisp Machines (NXP1000), and on add-in cards forSun Microsystems (UX400, UX1200) andApple Macintosh (MacIvory I, II, III) computers. The Lisp Machines with Ivory processors operated at speeds that were between two and six times faster than a 3600 depending on the model and the revision of the Ivory chip.The Ivory
instruction set was later emulated in software for theDEC Alpha series of 64-bitmicroprocessor s. The "Virtual Lisp Machine"emulator , combined with theoperating system and software development environment from the XL machines, is sold as Open Genera.unstone
Sunstone was a
RISC -like processor that was to be released shortly after the Ivory. It was designed by Ron Lebel's group at the Symbolics Westwood office. However, the project was canceled the day it was supposed to tape out.Endgame
Unfortunately, as quickly as the commercial AI boom of the mid 1980s had propelled Symbolics to success, the "
AI Winter " of the late 1980s and early 1990s, combined with the slow down of Reagan's "Star Wars"missile defense program, for whichDARPA had invested heavily in AI solutions, severely damaged Symbolics. An internal war between Noftsker and the CEO the board had hired in 1986, Brian Sear, over whether to follow Sun's suggested lead and focus on selling their software, or to re-emphasize their superior hardware, and the ensuing lack of focus when both Noftsker and Sear were fired from the company caused sales to plummet. This fact, combined with some ill-advised real estate deals by company management during the boom years (they had entered into large long-term lease obligations in California), drove Symbolics intobankruptcy . Rapid evolution inmass-market microprocessor technology (the "PC revolution"), advances in Lisp compiler technology, and the economics of manufacturing custommicroprocessor s severely diminished the commercial advantages of purpose-built Lisp machines. By 1995, the Lisp machine era had ended, and with it Symbolics' hopes for success.Symbolics still continues as an enterprise under very limited revenue, supported mainly by service contracts on the remaining MacIvory, UX-1200, UX-1201, and other machines still used by commercial customers. Symbolics also sells Virtual Lisp Machine (VLM) software for DEC, Compaq and HP Alpha workstations (
AlphaStation ) and servers, refurbished MacIvory IIs and Symbolics keyboards.In July 2005, Symbolics closed its Chatsworth California maintenance facility. The reclusive owner of the company, Andrew Topping, died that same year. The current legal status of Symbolics software is uncertain. [http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/cadr_faq.html] An assortment of Symbolics hardware was still available for purchase as of August 2007. [http://www.lispmachine.net/symbolics.txt]
First .com Domain
Symbolics.com [http://www.symbolics.com] , owned by the aforementioned corporation is largely regarded as the first (and, since it is still registered, the oldest) registered .com domain of the modern internet. [http://www.jottings.com/100-oldest-dot-com-domains.htm]
Networking
Genera also featured the most extensive networking interoperability software seen to that point. A
local area network system calledChaosnet had been invented for the Lisp Machine (predating the commercial availability ofEthernet ). The Symbolics system supported Chaosnet, but also had one of the first TCP/IP implementations. It also supported DECNET and IBM's SNA network protocols. A Dialnet protocol used phone lines andmodem s. Genera would, using hints from its distributed "namespace" database (somewhat similar to DNS, but more comprehensive, like parts of Xerox's Grapevine), automatically select the best protocol combination to use when connecting to network service. An application program (or a user command) would only specify the name of the host and the desired service. For example, a host name and a request for "Terminal Connection" might yield a connection over TCP/IP using the TELNET protocol (although there were many other possibilities). Likewise, requesting a file operation (such as a Copy File command) might pick NFS, FTP, NFILE (the Symbolics network file access protocol), or one of several others, and it might execute the request over TCP/IP, Chaosnet, or whatever other network was most suitable.Contributions to computer science
Symbolics' research and development staff (first at MIT, and then later at the company) produced a number of major innovations in software technology:
*Flavors, one of the earliest
object-oriented extensions to Lisp, was amessage-passing object system patterned afterSmalltalk , but withmultiple inheritance and a number of other enhancements. The Symbolicsoperating system made heavy use of Flavors objects. The experience gained with Flavors led to the design of New Flavors, a short-lived successor based ongeneric function s rather thanmessage passing . Many of the concepts in New Flavors formed the basis of theCLOS (Common Lisp Object System) standard.
*Advances in garbage collection techniques by Henry Baker,David Moon and others, particularly the first commercial use of generational scavenging, allowed Symbolics computers to run large Lisp programs for months at a time.
*Symbolics staffersDan Weinreb ,David Moon ,Neal Feinberg ,Kent Pitman , Scott McKay,Sonya Keene and others made significant contributions to the emerging Common Lisp language standard from the mid-1980s through the release of the ANSI Common Lisp standard in 1994.
*Symbolics introduced one of the first commercialobject-oriented database s, Statice, in 1989. The developers of Statice later went on to found Object Design, Inc. and createObjectStore
*Under contract from AT&T, Symbolics developed Minima, a real-time Lisp run-time environment and operating system for the Ivory processor. This was delivered in a small hardware configuration featuring lots of RAM (no disk) and dual network ports. It was used as the basis for a next-generation carrier class long-distance telephone switch.
*The Graphics Division's Craig Reynolds devised an algorithm that simulated the flocking behavior of birds in flight. "Boids " made their first appearance atSIGGRAPH in the 1987 animated short "", produced by the Graphics Division. Reynolds went on to win the Scientific And Engineering Award fromThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998.
*TheSymbolics Document Examiner hypertext system originally used for the Symbolics manuals- it was based on Zmacs following a design byJanet Walker , and proved influential in the evolution of hypertext.
* [http://www.symbolics.com/ Symbolics] was the first '.com' commercial domain ever registered on the Internet. Symbolics, Inc. registered symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.References
*Clark Baker, David Chan, Jim Cherry, Alan Corry, Greg Efland, Bruce Edwards, Mark Matson, Henry Minsky, Eric Nestler, Kalman Reti, David Sarrazin, Charles Sommer, David Tan and Neil Weste. The Symbolics Ivory Processor: A 40 Bit Tagged Architecture Lisp Microprocessor. "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Design". 1987. Pages 512-514.
External links
* [http://www.symbolics.com/ Symbolics]
** [http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics-tech-summary.html "Symbolics Technical Summary"]
* [http://smbx.org/ The Symbolics Museum]
* [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/pubs/lists/lisp/slug/ Archives from the Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) Mailing List, 1986-1993]
* [ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/slug/ Archives from the Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) Mailing List, 1990-1999]
* [http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html Ralf Möller's Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum]
** [http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/development-environment/index.html A page of screenshots of Genera]
** [http://lispm.dyndns.org/genera-concepts/genera.html "Genera Concepts"] - (Web copy of Symbolic's introduction to Genera)
* [http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Symbolics.pdf "Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of Heterogenous engineering"] - (PDF file)
* [http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/literature.html Literature on Symbolics and Lisp machines] - (from the Symbolics Lisp Machine)
* [http://home.rbcarleton.com/rbc/symbolics/announcements/ A collection of press releases from Symbolics]
** [http://home.rbcarleton.com/rbc/symbolics/announcements/19870519-ivory.txt "SYMBOLICS ANNOUNCES THE FIRST TRUE SINGLE-CHIP LISP CPU"] - (Symbolics press release announcing the Ivory chip)
* for Symbolics onWikiWikiWeb
* [http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/lisp/ Lisp machines timeline] -(a timeline of Symbolics' and others' Lisp machines)
* [http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-symbolics-fail "Why Did Symbolics Fail?"] -(by Daniel Weinreb)
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