Talk:Lucid Inc.

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rpgpoet: I tried to clarify some of the facts in this article. In particular, I did this:

Lucid per se was not the goal of the LLNL startup plans - the tentative name was FTL (Faster Than Light). There were 3 components of the BP for FTP: the hardware, the operating system and C compiler, and a Lisp system. Lucid came out of the BP for this third part of FTL. I didn't add all this info, since I think it's not that important to the article.
The relationship between the founders of Lucid and the Common Lisp group was made more accurate. Five of the ten founders were in the group. You can check that by looking here [1]
I clarified the deal with Symbolics that was already mentioned. The original material apparently came from this quote from "Patterns of Software" by Gabriel

"In the summer of 1985 we showed our early version of Lucid Common Lisp (LCL) at IJCAI, the big AI conference in Los Angeles. At that time we had the OEMs mentioned and a relationship with Symbolics to provide a development environment for Lucid Common Lisp on Symbolics computers based on the one we used for developing LCL. Recall that before starting Lucid, we had pitched the idea of a stock hardware Lisp to Symbolics, but they did not show interest. It turns out they had estimated that on the next generation of Sun workstations— the Motorola 68020-based Sun 3—Common Lisp could run no faster than 17 times slower than on the Symbolics 3600, which was a custom microcoded Lisp machine."

Decline

I don't have time to edit this in, but the cause of the bankruptcy is dead wrong, according to RG's published words. Lucid's Common Lisp sales weren't really sales, they were loans that had to be payed back, at least in part, if the product didn't sell enough units. Their C++ product was doing well enough (maybe even cash positive, this would need to be checked), when those loans were called. The money people were willing to see where the C++ effort would go, but weren't willing to pony up a lot of cash just to redeem those loans, the risk/reward picture wasn't good enough. So they let Lucid go bankrupt. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hga (talk • contribs) 15:43, 6 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]