- Lucid Inc.
Lucid Incorporated was a software development company founded by
Richard P. Gabriel in1984 , which went bankrupt in1994 .Beginnings
Gabriel had been working for Lawrence Livermore National Labs on a computer hardware project called "S1", the first incarnation of which used a CISC processor. The
compiler technology necessary to take full advantage of the instruction set proved to be infeasible to develop, and the second incarnation was instead aRISC processor. The secret ingredient waslaser pantography , a process which used a focussed laser to etch the semiconductors of the chip rather than the usual photographic mask. The team working on this project began writing a business plan to producesupercomputers , including all its basic software, with this spun-off technology. During the process of fleshing out the business plan and seeking venture capital, the goal changed from producing supercomputers to producing commercial implementations of, and development environments for, the recently finalized programming languageCommon Lisp , which Gabriel expected to become the standard AI language. Lucid's prospects were enhanced by the fact that five of the ten initial founders (Bill Scherlis ,Scott Fahlman ,Eric Benson ,Rodney Brooks , and Gabriel) were on the committee that had written the Common Lisp standard; moreover, Gabriel was the initiator of the Common Lisp design effort, Fahlman was its "de facto" leader, and both Gabriel and Fahlman were part of the standard's five-person core group of authors (known as the "Quinquevirate"; these were Guy L. Steele Jr., Fahlman, David A. Moon, Daniel L. Weinreb, and Gabriel). The firstCEO wasTony Slocum , formerly of IntelliCorp; and Gabriel was Lucid's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and first president. The interpreter and the environment for Common Lisp they intended to market was not for the then-dominantLisp machine s, however. Regularworkstation s had become fast enough to reasonably run Lisp languages, and it was this, much larger market, that Lucid targeted.Six months after getting $600,000 in seed money, Lucid had a bare-bones implementation running. On the strength of this, they received a further $3,500,000 in venture capital, and had OEM agreements with
Sun Microsystems ,Apollo Computer , and Prime, and they had an agreement withSymbolics that they would put a Lucid Common Lisp cross-development environment on their Lisp machines, enabling programmers to develop software on Symbolics Lisp machines that could run on Unix workstations under Lucid Common Lisp. (Symbolics apparently agreed to this because they had drastically underestimated the speed of Lisp on Unix workstations to be somewhere around 17 times as slow as on a Symbolics 3600.)Initial success
The product the company ultimately shipped was an integrated Lisp IDE for
Sun Microsystems 'RISC hardware architecture—this sidestepped the principal failure ofLisp machine s by in essence rewriting a lesser version of the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture.Despite its success in shipping its environment with many computer manufacturers like
Hewlett-Packard ,IBM ,Intel ,Groupe Bull , DEC etc. Lucid suffered several setbacks during this period, including a new CEO,Bob Kadarauch (the old one, while extremely competent and effective, suffered from depression when the company failed to take off despite his doing everything right), and a massive investment trying to duplicate Symbolic's Lisp machine OS for an IBM workstation (theRT-PC ) which flopped. The fact that Lucid, to focus on producing quality programs, had no contact with actual customers meant that the systemic problems with the whole Lisp industry were exacerbated by a lack of feedback from the users.In 1987, Gabriel resigned as President, but remained its CTO.
Decline
Eventually Lucid's focus shifted (during the
AI Winter ) from the Lisp market (which was still growing at this time) to anObject-oriented IDE forC++ called "Energize". A core component of the IDE wasRichard Stallman 's version ofEmacs ,GNU Emacs . GNU Emacs was not suitable for Lucid's needs, however, and several Lucid programmers (including Jamie W. Zawinski) were assigned to help develop GNU Emacs to meet those needs. Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman over how to handle GUI issues, and Lucid forked the software—thus they were primarily responsible for the birth ofXEmacs .By 1994, Lucid's attempts to reinvent itself as a C++ company, and its neglect of its still profitable Lisp sideline had ended in failure, and the company's revenues fell to levels which could not sustain it. Lucid Incorporated went
bankrupt . The rights to Lucid Common Lisp were sold toHarlequin Ltd. which was bought byGlobal Graphics ; Global Graphics then sold the right to Xanalys Corporation, which spun offLispWorks , the current rights holder which sellsLucid Common Lisp under the "Liquid Common Lisp" [http://www.lispworks.com/products/lcl.html] label. The rights to Energize apparently were bought byTartan, Inc. External links
* [http://dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf "Patterns of Software"] - a collection of essays by Gabriel, including some memoirs about Lucid (pdf)
* [http://www.dreamsongs.com/DiBona-OReillyLetter.html "Letter to Chris DiBona and Tim O'Reilly"] —(Open letter by Gabriel written about the XEmacs fork in response to the description of the fork in [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html] )
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