Subject: Re: Starting all over from 16.1 ?
From: "Chuck Siska"<[email-masked]>

18 Feb 1997 10:14:57 -0800
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>The real reason for starting GNU was that Lisp Machines Incorporated
>(LMI) used to make Lisp Machines which ran the MIT lisp system.  Then
>Symbolics came along (no, I don't remember the names of the
>principals), hired away any MIT AI Lab hackers who would come, got MIT
>to assign them the copyright for MACSYMA, and started doing serious
>development on the MIT lisp system under a Symbolics copyright.

another little historical note to add interest...

Richard Stallman created Emacs in about 1976 at the MIT AI Lab.

From a discussion many years ago with Howie Shrobe, with the usual
caveats for misrememberings and mistakes:

  LMI was founded by a (or the) "senior" lisp-machine project hacker
  in the MIT AI Lab, Richard Greenblatt.  When he founded LMI, he
  didn't include any of the other AI Lab hackers, although some of
  them had been pushing Greemblatt to form a business (which
  included them all) for maybe a year prior to that.

  The following year, most of the rest of the AI Lab hackers (about
  a dozen, and perhaps somewhat pissed at Greenblatt) finally got
  backing to found Synbolics.  Some of these were Howie Shrobe,
  David Moon, and Howard Cannon.

Both LMI and Symbolics used the MIT AI Lisp Machine architecture and
software in its initial products.  Their software continued to be
based on that of MIT.

-- [email-masked]

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