I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines.
Yes, back then one person could write the code base, which has long since grown and been ported off those machines. The KB is what matters anyway. I built it so different people could work on the kb simultaneously, which was unusual in those days, even though cloud computing was ubiquitous at PARC (where Doug had been working, and I had too).
Neurosymbolic approaches are pretty important and there’s good work going on in that area. I was back in that field myself until I got dragged away to work on the climate. But I’m not sure that manually curated KBs will make much of a difference beyond bootstrapping.
I don't want to rob you of your literary freedom, but that threw me off. Mainframes were meant, yes?
FYI: here are the release notes of the recently release Allegro CL 11.0: https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/release-note...
IIRC, Cyc gets delivered on other platforms&languages (C, JVM, ... ?). Would be interesting to know what they use for deployment/delivery.
I mostly wanted to know of any technical obstacles so SBCL could be improved. If I had to wildly guess, maybe GC performance? SBCL was behind ACL on that many years ago (on both speed and physical memory requirements) the last time I made a comparison.
No not at all. We’re talking early-mid 1980s so people in the research community (at least at the leading institutions) were by then pretty used to what’s called cloud computing these days. In fact the term “cloud” for independent resources you could call upon without knowing the underlying architecture came from the original Internet papers (talking originally about routing, and then the DNS) in the late 70s
So for example the mail or file or other services at PARC just lived in the network; you did the equivalent of an anycast to check your mail or look for a file. These had standardized APIs so it didn’t matter if you were running Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, or Cedar/Mesa you just had a local window into a general computing space, just as you do today.
Most was on the LAN, of course, as the ARPANET was pretty slow. But when we switched to TCP/IP the LAN/WAN boundaries became transparent and instead of manually bouncing through different machines I could casually check my mail at MIT from my desk at PARC.
Lispms were slightly less flexible in this regard back then, but then again Ethernet started at PARC. But even in the late 70s it wasn’t weird to have part of your computation run on a remote machine you weren’t logged into interactively.
The Unix guys at Berkeley eventually caught up with this (just look at the original sockets interface, very un-unixy) but they didn’t quite get it: I always laughed when I saw a sun machine running sendmail rather than trusting the network to do the right thing on its behalf. By the time Sun was founded that felt paleolithic to me.
Because I didn’t start computing until the late 70s I pretty much missed the whole removable media thing and was pretty much always network connected.
Yes, back then one person could write the code base
A coworker of mine who used to work at Symbolics told me that this was endemic with Lisp development back in the day. Some customers would think there was a team of 300 doing the OS software at Symbolics. It was just 10 programmers.
I had learned about "AI" in the 80's. The promise was that with lisp and expert systems and prolog and more.
the article said cyc was reading the newspaper every day.
I thought, wow, any day now computers will leap forward. The japanese 5th generation computing will be left in the dust. :)