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Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.lang.lisp,comp.misc,comp.sys.xerox,misc.invest
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!tjhorton
From: tjhorton@csri.toronto.edu (Tim Horton)
Subject: Re: Symbolics stock
Message-ID: <8806060457.AA06947@sheppard.csri.toronto.edu>
Summary: reprint
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
References: <57@daitc.ARPA> <33064@linus.UUCP> <692@esl.UUCP> <870@papaya.bbn.com> <1115@gmu90x.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Date:	Sun, 5 Jun 88 23:37:22 EDT

In article <1115@gmu90x.UUCP> heldeib@gmu90x.UUCP () writes:
>I read in a recent article that many of the AI companies including
>Symbolics, of course LMI, Xerox, and software oriented companies
>were losing money. I can't find the article at the moment but

It was probably the one in the IEEE "The Institute" news supplement
to IEEE Spectrum, May 1988, Page 1.


"AI: lower costs, new markets sought", by Glenn Zorpette

   Until a year and a half ago, business was brisk...
High technology giants Texas Instruments of Dallas and Xerox Corporation
in Stamford, Conn., were among the handful of companies pushing (Lisp
machines).
   But for months, sales of TI and Xerox machines have been slow, and market
leader Symbolics Inc. of Cambridge Mass., has reported losses for six straight
quarters.  Symbolics lost over $25 million on its fiscal 1987 sales of $104 M,
and the first quarter of its fiscal 1988 brought a loss of $4.5 M, with another
$2.7 M gone in the second quarter.
  "Artificial intelligence is clearly not the broadly based technology people
thought it was three or four years ago," says Thomas J. Martin, director of the
AI program at Arthur D. Little Inc., in Cambridge, Mass.  "And the amount of
training required to make effective use of the technology was vastly
underrated.  It's not a simple, straightforward activity to sit down and use
a Lisp machine."
   All the same, both Symbolics and TI, the second biggest supplier of Lisp
machines, are out to beat the downturn in sales by finding new AI markets.
They are aiming first at the gap between high-end $50K units and ordinary
workstations running Lisp software.
  On March 3, TI unveiled the microExplorer computer system, which will sell
for only $15K to $25K depending on memory and monitor.  It is essentially a
Macintosh II computer system from Apple Inc., of Cupertino, Calif., outfitted
with a board based on a custom Lisp microprocessor designed and produced by TI.
  Next August, Symbolics plans to introduce a Lisp microprocessor at the meeting
of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) at St. Paul,
Minn., according to Neil Weste, a company spokesman.  At the same time,
Symbolics hopes to introduce a board incorporating its Lisp chip, also for the
Macintosh II, to be followed later by boards for other machines.
   The moves are seen both as an effort to stem the loss of business to cheaper
general-purpose machines and as heralding a new phase for the AI computer
industry. [slow death :-)]  This phase will embrace a wider variety of
machines, often inexpensive by todays standards and more narrowly focused on
particular groups of users...
   The drop in sales of today's special-purpose machines was partly due to
stiff competition from technical workstations, which are also often used to
create Lisp programs.  For example, in the last two months, Hewlett-Packard
Co. in Palo Alto, Calif., and Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard, Mass., both
announced artificial intelligence software for their technical workstations.
Although outperformed by the best Lisp machines, workstations are far cheaper
than TI's Explorer II and the Symbolics 3650, which cost more than $50K.
   TI's new microExplorer, however, offers better Lisp performance than
comparably priced general purpose workstations.  With the Machintosh II's
Motorola MC68020 microprocessor, the microExplorer can run a version of the
Unix operating system... TI also introduced a $10K package so that an owner of
a Macintosh II can upgrade it to a microExplorer.
   The microExplorer offers roughly two and a half times the performance of
TI's $40K Explorer AI Workstation, introduced in 1984, but about half that
of the Explorer II.  Though the Explorer II and the microExplorer use the
same custom Lisp microprocessor, the more powerful machine is optimized
thoughout for Lisp and so, like the Symbolics 3650, is more suitable for
intensive AI development work -- for example, in writing programs for
personal computers, robots, or superminicomputers. [?]
   The Macintosh II is coincidentally based on NuBus, like all the Explorer
products.  Developed at MIT, the 32-bit bus technology is now owned by TI.
Familiarity with NuBus simplified the job in integrating the Lislp chip into
the Macintosh II, which TI engineers did in less than a year, Smith said.
(NuBus is draft IEEE bus standard number 1196).
   Symbolics long-awaited Lisp chip, called Ivory, is expected to be the most
powerful ever.  The company is working on boards not only for the Macintosh II
but for the IBM AT personal computer and compatibles, as well as for a
"popular" workstation whose name Weste declined to disclose.
   The offerings will be part of a three-tier strategy.  "Lisp is going from
a research base to a more mixed group that wants Unix or MS-DOS," Weste noted.
"For them, lower performance is OK," so a personal computer or workstation
equipped with Lisp processor is good enough.  This group forms the middle tier
identified by Symbolics.
   Below this group are users with even more modest AI needs, best served by
software that runs on conventional processors.  Symbolics intends to address
this group, too.
   The highest tier encompasses users doing heavy developmental work or
pushing the state of the art in such fields as pattern recognition.  They will
still need the power of full-fledged $50K Lisp machines, in Weste's view.
   Word length is one main difference between the Symbolics and TI Lisp
microprocessors... certain features of the Lisp language favor longer
words... [much stuff deleted]
   One AI specialist who uses both TI and Symbolics machines noted that the
American National Standards Institute is about to adopt a formal standard for
object-oriented programming in Lisp... [much more stuff deleted]