Symbolics - Contributions To Computer Science

Contributions To Computer Science

Symbolics' research and development staff (first at MIT, and then later at the company) produced a number of major innovations in software technology:

• Flavors, one of the earliest object-oriented extensions to Lisp, was a message-passing object system patterned after Smalltalk, but with multiple inheritance and a number of other enhancements. The Symbolics operating system made heavy use of Flavors objects. The experience gained with Flavors led to the design of New Flavors, a short-lived successor based on generic functions rather than message passing. Many of the concepts in New Flavors formed the basis of the CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) standard.
• Advances in garbage collection techniques by Henry Baker, David Moon and others, particularly the first commercial use of generational scavenging, allowed Symbolics computers to run large Lisp programs for months at a time.
• Symbolics staffers Dan Weinreb, David Moon, Neal Feinberg, Kent Pitman, Scott McKay, Sonya Keene and others made significant contributions to the emerging Common Lisp language standard from the mid-1980s through the release of the ANSI Common Lisp standard in 1994.
• Symbolics introduced one of the first commercial object-oriented databases, Statice, in 1989. The developers of Statice later went on to found Object Design, Inc. and create ObjectStore.
• Symbolics introduced in 1987 one of the first commercial microprocessors designed to support the execution of Lisp programs: the Symbolics Ivory. Symbolics also used its own CAD system (NS, New Schematic) for the development of the Ivory chip.
• Under contract from AT&T, Symbolics developed Minima, a real-time Lisp run-time environment and operating system for the Ivory processor. This was delivered in a small hardware configuration featuring lots of RAM (no disk) and dual network ports. It was used as the basis for a next-generation carrier class long-distance telephone switch.
• The Graphics Division's Craig Reynolds devised an algorithm that simulated the flocking behavior of birds in flight. "Boids" made their first appearance at SIGGRAPH in the 1987 animated short "Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice", produced by the Graphics Division. Reynolds went on to win the Scientific And Engineering Award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998.
• The Symbolics Document Examiner hypertext system originally used for the Symbolics manuals- it was based on Zmacs following a design by Janet Walker, and proved influential in the evolution of hypertext.
• Symbolics was very active in the design and development of the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) presentation-based User Interface Management System. CLIM is a descendant of Dynamic Windows, Symbolics' own window system. CLIM was the result of the collaboration of several Lisp companies.
• Symbolics produced the first workstation which could genlock, the first to have real time video I/O, the first to support digital video I/O and the first to do HDTV.