SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Schmidt) (09/07/88)
Herewith are some of my observations on the commercial exhibits at AAAI
in Saint Paul.
Most people I talked to felt that this wasn't as exciting a
show as in some years previous. Eg. I didn't notice any new entries in the
workstation arena. Software vendors concentrated on porting their wares
to new platforms and implementing marginal improvements.
For me, no exhibits aroused the visceral excitement of the
dead fish tracking system in the TI exhibit last year. One firm did
show a system that visually tracked a radio-controlled toy tank in the area.
I was pleased that vendors were allowed to actually sell on the floor
and didn't have to be coy about prices as in previous years.
A number of vendors showed board-level co-processors to
support compute-intensive embedded AI products. Eg. two vendors (Topologix,
Definicon) sold boards containing 4 Inmos transputers, and encouraged the
buyer to put up to eight of these in a workstation. (The Definicon,
starting at $25,000 per board can run into some big bucks, but they claim
you get 80 MIPS per board. (!))
Sequent was at the show with a machine containing 2-30 80386's.
Neither BBN nor Intel showed their multiprocessor platforms this year.
TI showed a four-explorer multiprocessor hack that they put together
to suit the needs of a small group of customers. The processors share a
NUBUS hence memory, but the structure of the bus is not a bottleneck as long
as each processor sticks primarily to an associated memory board.
The burden of inter-processor communication rests on the programmer's
management of memory he declares to be shared.
TI also showed the Explorer II Plus, a re-engineered Explorer II
processor board clocked at 40 MHz--roughly twice the speed of the Explorer II.
Symbolics showed the MacIvory board for the Macintosh. Symbolics and
TI seemed to have agreed not to quibble about speed claims for their
macintosh board products, describing performance as roughly equal.
The current Ivory chip is in 2-micron technology. The sales rep held
out the hope that if Symbolics could get a Silicon foundry with the same
fabrication technology as TI used in their lisp chip, they could get a
four-fold increase in speed with the existing design. In the meantime, they
want to complete with TI on the basis of their software. Implementation
point: unlike the TI MicroExplorer, which uses private memory, the MacIvory
uses the mac's nubus memory. Mitigating the obvious performance penalty is
a memory cache on the Symbolics board (on the Ivory chip??). They also
showed a VMEbus workstation based on the Ivory chip. After the show, I read
that Symbolics has a run-time package for the IBM PC. I didn't see it.
Hewlett-Packard and Symbolics both showed synthetic animation systems
implemented in lisp. So who said lisp isn't a systems language!
Coral showed their standalone application generator and foreign-
function interface; otherwise the same product as last year. Lightweight
processes will have to wait for the next major release--in 9 months or so.
Gold Hill showed their expert system shell ("Goldworks II") running
on Suns and Mac II's (on top of Coral lisp in the latter case!).
Lucid publicized a service they now provide (called Distill) to
analyze a system running in one of their lisps, and generate a specially
compacted run-time core image with code and data specially grouped to minimize
paging of irrelevant data.
A new software company (new to me at least) from Cambridge, England
called Harlequin, showed a Common Lisp implementation and what they called a
state-of-the-art programming environment. (This meant Masterscope.) They
had also designed and implemented their own PostScript-based window system ala
NeWS (which they were also selling independently of their lisp). My personal
reading of the market is that managers want "standard" window systems rather
than better window systems, so their effort is doomed to be even less
successful than Sun's. On the other hand, other attendees at the show
seemed less excited by X than they were last year, so maybe the pendulum
is about to swing the other way?? (I hope!) Maybe then managers will become
interested in better programming environments (as opposed to "standard"
programming environments)...
Speaking of better programming environments...
As everyone on this list should know by now, Xerox AIS has
reorganized as the employee-owned `Envos', carrying pretty much the
entire AIS product line. The big introduction this year was the Medley
release which was shown running on Sun-3's and Sun-4's as well as on
doves and dandelions. The Sun-based product was achieved by
implementing the same virtual machine as used on the d-machines, but
in C instead of microcode. This approach provides an extraordinary
degree of compatibitily, as you might expect. It also means that Medley
doesn't require extraordinary amounts of real memory (typically
associated with other lisps on the Sun), because of the compact
instruction set and garbage collection strategy. Speed on the high-end
configuration demonstrated (a Sun 4/260) was described as a little over
twice that of a dorado.
Envos also introduced Rooms as a commercial product.
Both Rooms and LOOPS were announced to be shipable at the same
time as the rest of Medley (October 1st). (!)
The booth was the most visually dramatic on the show floor--sort
of a giant life-sized version of the magenta and teal announcements sent
in the mail.
The price of Medley (for Sun or d-machine) is $10,000 per copy
($7000 for educational customers). LOOPS is $7000 ($4900 educational).
Rooms is $2995 ($2100 educational). Special pricing is available for
government and quantity customers.
Owing to some confusion, there were two different users group
meetings. I attended the Monday meeting. Most of the meeting covered
the makeup of Envos and products (summarized above). People
from a couple of sites who had beta-tested Medley on the Sun talked
about the experience. Both said it was not much different from moving
between earlier releases.
I asked about source availability. The answer was that they didn't
plan to make sources available, at least not for the old price.
There was no discussion of RS232 or FX80 problems!!
Advice on what Envos should do next was solicited. I asked
for a Mac II product (and wasn't the only academic with this wish).
Some suits voted for an 80386 version.
As usual, I invite other readers to comment on the show and/or
make corrections/additions to what I have said above.
--Christopher
-------