bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (06/05/88)
Another interesting mega-trend in (relatively recent) computing history has been the Macsyma Vitalism Theory. A *lot* of ITS stuff fed at that trough. I believe it was a grant to port Macsyma to something bigger than a PDP-11 (after PDP-10 -> 11) which got Bill Joy et al (the PI would be Fateman) their first Vax and supported the port of Unix and the virtual memory implementation and 4.x releases. Not sure how influential it was in the early Lisp Machine (CADR) development, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "very". MacLisp, Franz Lisp and NIL at least all owe their devpt to a mad dash to host Macsyma efficiently. I suspect someone could trace a lot of pragmatic motivation (ie. money) for the ARPAnet to people trying to get to MC: to use Macsyma... I'm sure there's more, more than folks like to think about...I suspect that emacs goes back into that same line, at least indirectly. -Barry Shein, Boston University