Symbolics
Symbolics can refer to two computer companies: the defunct Symbolics, Inc., and the company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to maintain and sell the system operating system Open Genera and the computer algebraic system Macsyma.
Symbolics registered the symbolics.com domain on March 15, 1985, constituting the world's first.com domain. On August 27, 2009 it was sold to XF.com Investments.
History
Symbolics, Inc. was created on April 9, 1980 in Delaware by Robert P. Adams, president; Russell Noftsker, secretary, and Andrew Egendorf, attorney. It was a computer equipment manufacturing company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Concord, Massachusetts, with workshops in Chatsworth, an area near Los Angeles).
Symbolics was a division of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of two companies created by AI experts associated with hacker culture to build machines for Lisp. The other company created was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted more expertise and funding.
The Lisp machine software was copyrighted by MIT, and licensed to Symbolics. Until 1981, they shared the source code with MIT and kept it on a MIT server. According to Richard Stallman (one of the MIT experts), Symbolics made a business tactic by making fixes and enhancements to the operating system for Lisp machines only compatible with Symbolics, drowning out its competitor LMI, which did not have enough resources to maintain or develop the operating system.
In time Symbolics began using its own copies of the software, within the company's servers. Stallman said that Symbolics did not want to make improvements that would benefit Lisp Machines, Inc. Symbolics made extensive improvements to all parts of this software, and continued to release the source code to users and to MIT, but added a clause prohibiting redistribution of modifications. With the end of open collaboration came the end of the MIT hacker culture. In reaction to this Stallman created the GNU project to create a new community. Eventually Copyleft and the GNU General Public License guarantee that hacker software will remain free software. In this way Symbolics influenced, albeit in a contradictory way, the beginnings of the free software movement.
Decline of the company
Just as the AI commercial boom of the mid-1980s launched Symbolics to success, the AI winter of the early 1990s combined with the deactivation of Reagan's "Star Wars" program; in which DARPA did great research on AI, they did severe damage on Symbolics.
The rapid evolution of mass-market microprocessor technology (the "PC revolution"), advances in Lisp compiler technology, and the economics of custom chip manufacturing have declined markedly the commercial advantages of Lisp machines. By 1995, the era of the Lisp machine was over, and with it the hopes of Symbolics.
In July 2005, it closed its shops in Chatsworth, California. The company's reclusive owner, Andrew Topping, died the same year. The legal status of the company is uncertain. The United States Department of Defense continues to pay Symbolics for maintenance work.