LispOS directly on hardware or on Unix kernel?

[Mike McDonald]

>From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
>Subject: Re: LispOS directly on hardware or on Unix kernel?
>To: pisati@nichimen.com (Luca Pisati)
>Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 19:11:06 -0700 (PDT)
>
>> Yes, but, one of the main reasons of Symbolics death (apart
>> from shortsighted management), was that NO application was
>> available on it !  Yes, a great development environment, but
>> not even a single spreadsheet to do your counts. Not a word
>> processor unless you bought Concordia.
>
>SMBX _did_ have a spreadsheet in Lisp which was used extensively
>within the company.  I think that it was done by exactly 1 person, and
>it may have even been one of his first real programs.  It started out
>a bit on the slow side (I think he got carried away, and made every
>single cell a separate window!), but got speeded up as time went on.
>It had some neat features, including the use of bignums for neat
>number theory hacks!  There was some plan to interface it to Macsyma
>to make a macsyma spreadsheet with formulae.  I have no idea why SMBX
>never made this SW available outside the company.

  Same goes for NS!

>BTW, has anyone ever seen the 'Analyst' spreadsheet developed by Xerox
>Information Systems in Pasadena in Smalltalk for the US govt?  You can
>put anything you want into the cells, including pictures, recursive
>spreadsheets, etc.!  I've never seen either Xerox or ParcPlace ever
>push this product, even though those in the govt gave it very high
>marks.
>
>-- 
>Henry Baker

  Hmm. Sounds like Henry just volunteered to write the spreadsheet
program! :-)

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@engr.sgi.com