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From: activis@netcom.com (ActiVision)
Subject: Re: Smart Weapons [was Re: Lisp and AI:  Newbie Question]
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Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 16:24:51 GMT
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Scott Nettles (nettles@saul.cis.upenn.edu) wrote:
: In article <40lujv$jh0@fohnix.metronet.com>,
: Rajendra Wall <rwall@fohnix.metronet.com> wrote:
: >big headache. Being at the public trough encouraged non-commercially
: >viable solutions, pushing the technology away from delivering

: >My advice is give up on trying to "get funding" and instead
: >concentrate on building something that real people will want to buy. 

: I'm not sure that I buy this argument.

: The area of computer architecture provides some good counter examples.  For
: example, once there was this defense funded project at Stanford that developed
: a workstation and another that developed a microprocessor.  These days those
: projects still have basically the same names, SUN and MIPS.  And SGI, well Jim
: Clarke developed some chips at Stanford and even had DARPA help getting them
: fabbed.  And that SPARC on your desk, looks a lot like a Berkeley RISC to me.
: Furthermore, none of that work was "something real people wanted to buy" at the
: time it was done. In fact a lot of it flew directly in the face of the current
: conventional wisdom.

All of this is good history, but what it suggests to me is that academia
remains a good place for innovation because it exists apart from the quarter-
to-quarter commercial pressure to ship a product.  The fact that these efforts
were to some extent DOD/DARPA funded seems an orthogonal observation.

It's also worth mentioning that the examples you cite are examples of general
computer architectures, whereas the example that the original poster cited were
of efforts tailored explicitly to the perceived needs of the DOD/DARPA market,
and this might have made a crucial difference in their long-term success.

: I think a good case can be made that computer science in the US is what it is
: because of DOD money.  Now that might be good or bad, but it's hard to call it
: commercially unsuccessful.  Your simple economics would suggest that it would
: be a failure.

The same logic lies in the statement that "microelectronics and medicine in the
US is what it is because of the space program."  They're both true statements,
but they're also both historical.  It's not at all clear that the kind of
military technology transfer that fueled the commercialization of computer
science roughly from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s still pertains to today's
hardware or software markets.

: So maybe Lisp's problems aren't explained by such simple economic notions.
: Personally, I like the approach the architects have taken, which is basically
: showing that you can't afford to do it any other way.  Of course, that requires
: a lot of hard work, and funding...

Not to mention a lot of "throw it out there in the market and see what
happens," which may be good capitalist economics, but most microcomputer
software-development companies are already far too conservative to embrace.

: Scott
: nettles@cis.upenn.edu

Paul Snively
Activision, Inc.
psnively@activision.com
