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 a RISC processor. The "secret ingredient" was laser pantography, a process which used a focused 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 produce supercomputers, 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 language Common 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 first CEO was Tony 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-dominant Lisp machines, however. Regular workstations 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 with Symbolics 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.)
Read more about this topic: Lucid Inc.
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)