Re: TI & Open OODB funding

[Scott_Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

    I knew that the TI people were using CMU CL as a delivery vehicle for the
    Open OODB, which is DARPA funded.  But I was just reading in "Scientific
    American" (March, page 108) that:
        Last fall the agency [DARPA] provided 22 million through contracts to
        Texas Instruments, a group of universities and the National Institute
        of Standards and Technology. [for development of OODB technology]
    
    We wouldn't need a very big slice of that kind of funding...
    
This is true.  I wonder how much of the OODB work is in Lisp.  In any case,
let's be really nice to this Ford guy and see if we can get TI to really
become dependent on CMU CL.  And if we have a chance to find out more about
what they're doing or to cooperate with them (adding features or whatever),
let's cozy up.  I'm not sure that starting an OODB project of our own at
this late date would fly, but strategic alliances would make a lot of sense.

    w.r.t. this latter point.  We might want to make Hemlock code avaliable as a
    sort of GUI toolkit (as he is doing) even though we are moving away from it
    as our programming environment.
    
Yeah, that sounds right to me.  I still use Hemlock as the basis for my DX7
patch editor, for instance.  When it sees a certain kind of file, it knows
that it's packed numerical data rather than ASCII, and it builds a Hemlock
buffer that represents that data.  We may want to supply a customizable
"Hemlock widget" of some sort.

-- Scott