In a comment on a previous blog entry, I was asked why Symbolics failed. The following is oversimplified but should be good enough. My old friends are very welcome to post comments with corrections or additions, and of course everyone is invited to post comments.

First, remember that at the time Symbolics started around 1980, serious computer users used timesharing systems. The very idea of a whole computer for one person was audacious, almost heretical. Every computer company (think Prime, Data General, DEC) did their own hardware and their own software suite. There were no PCs’, no Mac’s, no workstations. At the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, fifteen researchers shared a computer with a .001 GHz CPU and .002 GB of main memory.

Symbolics sold to two kinds of customers, which I’ll call primary and secondary. The primary customers used Lisp machines as software development environments. The original target market was the MIT AI Lab itself, followed by similar institutions: universities, corporate research labs, and so on. The secondary customers used Lisp machines to run applications that had been written by some other party.

We had great success amongst primary customers. I think we could have found a lot more of them if our marketing had been better. For example, did you know that Symbolics had a world-class software development environment for Fortran, C, Ada, and other popular languages, with amazing semantics-understanding in the editor, a powerful debugger, the ability for the languages to call each other, and so on? We put a lot of work into those, but they were never publicized or advertised.

But we knew that the only way to really succeed was to develop the secondary market. ICAD made an advanced constraint-based computer-aided design system that ran only on Symbolics machines. Sadly, they were the only company that ever did. Why?

The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new “workstation” category of computer appeared: the Suns and Apollos and so on. New technology for implementing Lisp was invented that allowed good Lisp implementations to run on conventional hardware; not quite as good as ours, but good enough for most purposes. So the real value-added of our special Lisp architecture was suddenly diminished. A large body of useful Unix software came to exist and was portable amongst the Unix workstations: no longer did each vendor have to develop a whole software suite. And the workstation vendors got to piggyback on the ever-faster, ever-cheaper CPU’s being made by Intel and Motorola and IBM, with whom it was hard for Symbolics to keep up. We at Symbolics were slow to acknowledge this. We believed our own “dogma” even as it became less true. It was embedded in our corporate culture. If you disputed it, your co-workers felt that you “just didn’t get it” and weren’t a member of the clan, so to speak. This stifled objective analysis. (This is a very easy problem to fall into — don’t let it happen to you!)

The secondary market often had reasons that they needed to use workstation (and, later, PC) hardware. Often they needed to interact with other software that didn’t run under Symbolics. Or they wanted to share the cost of the hardware with other applications that didn’t run on Symbolics. Symbolics machines came to be seen as “special-purpose hardware” as compared to “general-purpose” Unix workstations (and later Windows PCs). They cost a lot, but could not be used for the wider and wider range of available Unix software. Very few vendors wanted to make a product that could only run on “special-purpose hardware”. (Thanks, ICAD; we love you!)

Also, a lot of Symbolics sales were based on the promise of rule-based expert systems, of which the early examples were written in Lisp. Rule-based expert systems are a fine thing, and are widely used today (but often not in Lisp). But they were tremendously over-hyped by certain academics and by their industry, resulting in a huge backlash around 1988. “Artificial Intelligence” fell out of favor; the “AI Winter” had arrived.

(Symbolics did launch its own effort to produce a Lisp for the PC, called CLOE, and also partnered with other Lisp companies, particularly Gold Hill, so that customers could develop on a Symbolics and deploy on a conventional machine. We were not totally stupid. The bottom line is that interest in Lisp just declined too much.)

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 signed long-term leases on big new offices and a new factory, anticipating growth that did not come, and were unable to sublease the properties due to office-space gluts, which drained a great deal of money. There were rounds of layoffs. More and more of us realized what was going on, and that Symbolics was not reacting. Having created an object-oriented database system for Lisp called Statice, I left in 1988 with several co-workers to form Object Design, Inc., to make an object-oriented database system for the brand-new mainstream object-oriented language, C++. (The company was very successful and currently exists as the ObjectStore division of Progress Software (www.objectstore.com). I’m looking forward to the 20th-year reunion party next summer.)

Symbolics did try to deal with the situation, first by making Lisp machines that were plug-in boards that could be connected to conventional computers. One problem is that they kept betting on the wrong horses. The MacIvory was a Symbolics Ivory chip (yes, we made our own CPU chips) that plugged into the NuBus (oops, long-since gone) on a Macintosh (oops, not the leading platform). Later, they finally gave up on competing with the big chip makers, and made a plug-in board using a fast chip from a major manufacturer: the DEC Alpha architecture (oops, killed by HP/Compaq, should have used the Intel). By this time it was all too little, too late.

The person who commented on the previous blog entry referred by to an MIT Masters thesis by one Eve Philips (see http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/ai-business.pdf) called “If It Works, It’s Not AI: A Commercial Look at Artificial Intelligence Startups”. This is the first I’ve heard of it, but evidently she got help from Tom Knight, who is one of the other Symbolics co-founders and knows as much or more about Symbolics history than I. Let’s see what she says.

Hey, this looks great. Well worth reading! She definitely knows what she’s talking about, and it’s fun to read. It brings back a lot of old memories for me. If you ever want to start a company, you can learn a lot from reading “war stories” like the ones herein.

Here are some comments, as I read along. Much of the paper is about the AI software vendors, but their fate had a strong effect on Symbolics.

Oh, of course, the fact that DARPA cut funding in the late 80’s is very important. Many of the Symbolics primary-market customers had been ultimately funded by DARPA research grants.

Yes, there were some exciting successes with rule-based expert systems. Inference’s “Authorizer’s Assistant” for American Express, to help the people who talk to you on the phone to make sure you’re not using an AmEx card fraudulently, ran on Symbolics machines. I learn here that it was credited with a 45-67% internal rate of return on investment, which is very impressive.

The paper has an anachronism: “Few large software firms providing languages (namely Microsoft) provide any kind of Lisp support.” Microsoft’s dominance was years away when these events happened. For example, remember that the first viable Windows O/S, release 3.1, came out in in 1990. But her overall point is valid.

She says “There was a large amount of hubris, not completely unwarranted, by the AI community that Lisp would change the way computer systems everywhere ran.” That is absolutely true. It’s not as wrong as it sounds: many ideas from Lisp have become mainstream, particularly managed (garbage-collected) storage, and Lisp gets some of the credit for the acceptance of object-oriented programming. I have no question that Lisp was a huge influence on Java, and thence on C#. Note that the Microsoft Common Language Runtime technology is currently under the direction of the awesome Patrick Dussud, who was the major Lisp wizard from the third MIT-Lisp-machine company, Texas Instruments.

But back then we really believed in Lisp. We felt only scorn for anyone trying to write an expert system in C; that was part of our corporate culture. We really did think Lisp would “change the world” analogously to the way “sixties-era” people thought the world could be changed by “peace, love, and joy”. Sorry, it’s not that easy.

Which reminds me, I cannot recommend highly enough the book “Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community” by Richard Gabriel (http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf) regarding the process by which technology moves from the lab to the market. Gabriel is one of the five main Common Lisp designers (along with Guy Steele, Scott Fahlman, David Moon, and myself), but the key points here go way beyond Lisp. This is the culmination of the series of papers by Gabriel starting with his original “Worse is Better”. Here the ideas are far more developed. His insights are unique and extremely persuasive.

OK, back to Eve Philips: at chapter 5 she describes “The AI Hardware Industry”, starting with the MIT Lisp machine. Does she get it right? Well, she says “14 AI lab hackers joined them”; see my previous post about this figure, but in context this is a very minor issue. The rest of the story is right on. (She even mentions the real-estate problems I pointed out above!) She amply demonstrates the weaknesses of Symbolics management and marketing, too. This is an excellent piece of work.

Symbolics was tremendously fun. We had a lot of success for a while, and went public. My colleagues were some of the skilled and likable technical people you could ever hope to work with. I learned a lot from them. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

After I left, I thought I’d never see Lisp again. But now I find myself at ITA Software, where we’re writing a huge, complex transaction-processing system (a new airline reservation system, initially for Air Canada), whose core is in Common Lisp. We almost certainly have the largest team of Common Lisp programmers in the world. Our development environment is OK, but I really wish I had a Lisp machine again.