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Hub AI
Symbolics AI simulator
(@Symbolics_simulator)
Hub AI
Symbolics AI simulator
(@Symbolics_simulator)
Symbolics
Symbolics, Inc. is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.
The symbolics.com domain was originally registered on 15 March 1985, making it the first .com-domain in the world. In August 2009, it was sold to napkin.com (formerly XF.com) Investments.
Symbolics, Inc. was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Concord, Massachusetts, with manufacturing facilities in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. Robert P. Adams (an MIT graduate) was Symbolics’ first President and co-founder along with Russell Noftsker, and in fact, the name “Symbolics” was coined by Robert Adams while the company was initially being formed in his home in Santa Monica, California. Its first CEO, chairman, and co-founder was Russell Noftsker. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the programming language Lisp. 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 for Tru64 UNIX on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Alpha.
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 was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.
Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2, introduced in 1981, was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design. The operating system and software development environment, over 500,000 lines, was written in Lisp from the microcode up, based on MIT's Lisp 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 of Emacs, was implemented in a text-processing package named ZWEI, an acronym for Zwei was Eine initially, with Eine being an acronym for Eine Is Not Emacs. Both are recursive acronyms 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 both Symbolics and LMI. Until 1981, Symbolics shared all its copyrighted enhancements to the source code with MIT and kept it on an MIT server. According to Richard Stallman, Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all Symbolics' copyrighted fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to Symbolics (and MIT but not to Symbolics competitors), and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment.
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. Eventually, Copyleft and the GNU General Public License would ensure that a hacker's software could remain free software. In this way, Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating the free software movement.
Symbolics
Symbolics, Inc. is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.
The symbolics.com domain was originally registered on 15 March 1985, making it the first .com-domain in the world. In August 2009, it was sold to napkin.com (formerly XF.com) Investments.
Symbolics, Inc. was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Concord, Massachusetts, with manufacturing facilities in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. Robert P. Adams (an MIT graduate) was Symbolics’ first President and co-founder along with Russell Noftsker, and in fact, the name “Symbolics” was coined by Robert Adams while the company was initially being formed in his home in Santa Monica, California. Its first CEO, chairman, and co-founder was Russell Noftsker. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the programming language Lisp. 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 for Tru64 UNIX on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Alpha.
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 was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.
Symbolics' initial product, the LM-2, introduced in 1981, was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design. The operating system and software development environment, over 500,000 lines, was written in Lisp from the microcode up, based on MIT's Lisp 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 of Emacs, was implemented in a text-processing package named ZWEI, an acronym for Zwei was Eine initially, with Eine being an acronym for Eine Is Not Emacs. Both are recursive acronyms 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 both Symbolics and LMI. Until 1981, Symbolics shared all its copyrighted enhancements to the source code with MIT and kept it on an MIT server. According to Richard Stallman, Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all Symbolics' copyrighted fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to Symbolics (and MIT but not to Symbolics competitors), and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment.
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. Eventually, Copyleft and the GNU General Public License would ensure that a hacker's software could remain free software. In this way, Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating the free software movement.